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Mr. Anthony Steen (Totnes): As I understand the figures from the House of Commons Library, 42 per cent. of the 37,600 parents who send their children to school through the assisted places scheme earn less than £10,000 per annum. They are the underprivileged. I wonder how the Secretary of State feels about taking that away from them?
Mr. Blunkett: The net income of the individual is taken into account, not earnings. As the former Tory Member for Buckingham, Mr. Walden, rightly said in this place, when Lloyd's names find themselves eligible for assisted places and when others find themselves with enormous capital assets following separation or divorce from an extremely wealthy former partner, as a result of a clean-break settlement, they can apply for and receive assisted places. Against that background, who is benefiting from the scheme? That is my point. The better-off seem to be doing pretty well out of the scheme, and have done so over the past 16 years.
The previous Member for Buckingham made a comment that sums up the way that we feel about the scheme. He said that there were only two things wrong with it: the principle and the practice. I cannot put it more succinctly than that.
The practice discriminates and prevents resources from being applied to the many. We know that the principle has been to deny the opportunity that we all seek, including even many Opposition Members, to transform the education service so that we do not have to have a two-tier system, and certainly not the belief that only a few can benefit from the service.
We are dealing with a scheme that, in every essence, is flawed. Substantial sums have been applied to very few children. The amount of money directed to individual places under the scheme massively exceeds the amount of money that is available to children in the state sector.
The current average under the standard spending assessment is £2,780 for a secondary school child in the state sector. The average of the assisted places contribution results in a fee of £4,100 being paid. That rises to well in excess of £10,000 in some of the 477 schools that are helped in England, as well as a small number of schools in Scotland and Wales. The Bill obviously applies to schools in Scotland and Wales as well.
Schools are benefiting from a substantial subsidy. The amount paid through the assisted places scheme for individual children is, on average, almost 50 per cent. in excess of what is available to the average child in a secondary school in our neighbourhoods. It is no wonder that parents think that the scheme is a good deal. I do not blame any parent wishing to see his or her child being educated in smaller classes with better equipment and with the ethos that many of us would want to see for ourselves.
I believe, however, that we have an obligation as a Government to ensure that that ethos, those class sizes and that equipment become available over time to our children as well as to others. In that way, we can transform education. At the same time, we can apply resources carefully and in a targeted fashion to best practice in all our schools.
Mr. Patrick McLoughlin (West Derbyshire):
The Secretary of State has just said that it is his ambition to take the ethos of private schools into the state system. Is he giving us a commitment that it is his ambition to reduce class sizes in the state sector to those that are found in the private sector, which means that we are talking about class sizes of 20 pupils in both primary and secondary schools?
Mr. Blunkett:
I have an ambition for excellence for our children in our schools. The Government's endeavour over, God and the electorate willing, and a similar life to that enjoyed by the previous Government, will be to reverse what I described earlier as the appalling legacy of 450,000 more children and 6,000 fewer teachers. That is the legacy which we inherited following literally two decades of neglect. It will take us time to reverse that, but our ambitions should be high and our endeavour clear so that we can set about doing the job that the previous Government neglected.
We have seen class sizes rise--last Friday, the Minister for School Standards announced, in our statistical submission, that the pupil-teacher ratio had worsened once again. Over the past 10 years, there has been a substantial worsening of the PTR in both our primary and secondary schools. Again, that is another legacy which we have to address.
It is very simple really. The Bill enables us to reuse resources so that we can give that life chance, that beginning, to our children, and ensure that they do not feel that they have--in the words of the former Deputy Prime Minister--to escape.
Clause 1 ends the duty on the Secretary of State to operate the scheme, and that we will do from the next academic year.
Clauses 2 and 3 put in place arrangements to phase out the scheme, and provide for regulations to prescribe the transitional provisions that are required.
Clause 4 deals with the definitions in the Bill.
Clause 5 enables us, because of the different education and legal system in Scotland, to apply the Bill to Scotland as well.
Mr. James Clappison (Hertsmere):
On clause 2, is the Secretary of State aware that, just a month before the election, prep school head teachers asked the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle), who was then the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman on education, whether assisted places schemes for children at prep schools would continue up to age of 13? Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the hon. Gentleman, speaking on behalf of the Labour party, said:
Mr. Blunkett:
I have the letter from my hon. Friend to Mr. Davies-Jones of St. Andrew's school in Eastbourne and am aware of what he said. I am very clear, and so is the Bill, that assisted places will remain in primary education up to the normal age of transfer at 11. Where an alternative transfer age applies in that area, the Secretary of State will have discretion, and my ministerial team and I will use it wisely, to ensure that we do not have a situation where 500,000 youngsters transfer at 11, but other people think that they can transfer at 13, even if 13 is not the normal transferable age in that locality. It would not do the children a favour if we pretended that we could do that. Discretion is the better part of valour, and we will use it wisely.
The Bill is more than simply a transfer of resources and a way of lowering class sizes; it is an article of good faith. It is about indicating to Britain as a whole that the Government have a different set of values and a different intent in terms of the way in which we address the needs of the individual and the needs of the nation for many years to come.
We believe that we can succeed in our education system. We believe that we can spread best practice from the best schools to the rest. We believe that we can learn from what is happening in the rest of the world and apply it to this country, which is why we have established the standards in effectiveness unit, and why I have established the new standards task force.
I believe that we can do it. Those who do not will want and encourage people to opt out. I know that we will not be able to set aside a private sector for education in this country. We can ask it to work with us. We can seek co-operation, and we will, but, in the end, we will succeed as a nation not if we have trickle down from the better off to the rest, or if only a few succeed and the others are faced with mediocrity--but only if every child and every family knows that they are valued and that their success is our success, because in the end that is what it is all about. We sink or swim together. It is not a few--five, 10 or even 20 per cent.--being able to carry other people because they have done very well for themselves. It is about the 80, 85 and 90 per cent. who have, for too long, carried people who have done very well at their expense.
Mrs. Gillian Shephard (South-West Norfolk):
The Bill is the first element of the new Government's education programme, and today gives me my first opportunity to make it clear at the outset that we shall support any constructive attempt by the Government to develop and build on the work that we did in raising education standards.
The Secretary of State has heard me say many times, in the House and elsewhere, that high education and skills levels are vital for individuals and for the nation, and he agrees. That is why, through our guiding principles of transparency and accountability, choice and diversity, we put in place the framework on which the right hon. Gentleman can now build.
We introduced transparency through inspection, performance tables, testing, reform of teacher training, qualifications for head teachers and measures for failing schools. We introduced accountability, with more freedom for schools, colleges and universities to manage their own affairs, target setting and more involvement for parents and local communities. We provided choice and diversity within the system, through a variety of schools--comprehensive, grant-maintained, specialist and so on--and a variety of routes for individual pupils: selective schools and the assisted places scheme.
Those principles of transparency, accountability and choice and diversity help to drive up standards, and standards are rising. We have seen year-on-year improvements in examination results; we have seen a revolution in access to higher education; we have seen steadily improving vocational routes. The Secretary of State is fortunate to have inherited a framework that is so firmly in place. We shall expect him and his team to try to improve it still further, and when the Government offer constructive and practical proposals to raise standards, we shall support them in their aims.
However, we reject the Government's clearly held view--so well illustrated by this mean little Bill--that choice, the freedom to make that choice, diversity of types of school and diversity of routes for individual pupils should be replaced by centrally planned uniformity. When the Government's proposals are driven by dogma, when they support that central planning at the expense of parental choice and when they self-evidently will not deliver what is promised, we shall strongly oppose them.
Let us set the Bill against those criteria. Is it driven by dogma? Does it restrict choice and the freedom to choose, thereby driving down standards and destroying excellence? Will it deliver what it promises? For the answer to the first question, we need only consider why a Conservative Government introduced the assisted places scheme. In 1976, in the International Monetary Fund-driven heyday of the previous Labour Government, the then Secretary of State for Education and Science--now a Member of another place and of another party--abolished the 200 direct grant schools in England and Wales.
Many of those schools had prided themselves for centuries on their tradition of educating a broad cross-section of the community, a tradition greatly prized by schools such as Colston's girls school in Bristol, Bradford grammar school, Leeds grammar school and many more--including Thetford grammar school in my constituency. Old Labour failed in its attempt to destroy that tradition in the 1970s, but, dogma-driven still, new Labour is returning to the attack in the 1990s, still persuaded of the view that, if all cannot have, none should.
Secondly, the Bill restricts parental choice. Its purpose is to remove from children in families on low incomes the opportunity of independent schooling and a different route.
Amid the avalanche--the myriad words uttered on every possible subject, at all hours of the day and night, by members of the Government since 1 May--two words have been strangely absent. They are "freedom" and "choice". Some members of the Government value and exercise choice for themselves and for their children, but those freedoms are not to be extended to everyone else's children, and most certainly not to able children from poorer families via the assisted places scheme.
"If a child has a place at a school which runs to age 13, then that place will be honoured through to 13"?
Why is the Secretary of State going back on that pledge in clause 2 and finishing education at the age of 11? Is that not the clearest example of a breach of promise?
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