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8.43 pm
Barbara Follett (Stevenage): I congratulate the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) on his speech and on his stamina. Like me, he has been in his place for the past five hours and 15 minutes. I can assure hon. Members that I am conscious of the fact that mine is the 18th maiden speech of the day and, despite anything that my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mrs. Organ) may say, one can have too much of a good thing, particularly at a quarter to 9 in the evening, even if it is a June evening. I shall therefore be brief.
First, I thank the people of Stevenage for electing me as their Member of Parliament. I am honoured to represent them, and promise to do my best to serve them in the future. Coincidentally, my predecessor, Tim Wood, also made his maiden speech during an education debate. Although I disagreed with most of what he said, I know that he was a hard-working and popular Member of the House, despite the fact that, for many years, he was a Whip. He fought the general election campaign honestly and fairly, concentrating on the issues and avoiding personalities. I salute him for that and wish him well.
Education also played a large part in the life of another of my predecessors, Shirley Williams, now Baroness Williams of Crosby, and in another place. However, she is still fondly referred to as "our Shirl" or "Shirl the girl" by many of her former constituents. I am glad that Stevenage is once more represented by a woman, even though as a grandmother I can hardly be called a girl any more.
I am even more glad that the election doubled the number of women in the House. That would have given Constance Lytton, an earlier resident of my constituency, a great deal of pleasure. She was a prominent suffragette and spent most of her life in the village of Knebworth, where, I am glad to say, she did not set fire to the local church. One of the first hunger strikers, she was force-fed in prison, which almost certainly led to her untimely death. Her family has given its name to one of Stevenage's main roads, but I believe that she deserves a more personal commemoration of her courage and commitment.
The constituency of Stevenage, which Shirley Williams described 33 years ago in her maiden speech as
One of the greatest changes came in 1946, when the new Labour Government--like this one--fresh from their landslide victory, decided to tackle the chronic housing shortage in the overcrowded and bomb-damaged east end of London by building 11 new towns. Stevenage, with its population of 6,000, was the first. There was resistance, of course--most notably from a local novelist, namedE. M. Forster, who had lived in Stevenage as a child and whose most famous work, "Howard's End", was based on Rook's Nest farm, in the old town.
Modern Stevenage has a population of more than 76,000. People came to the town to escape from the poverty and slums of the past. They found secure jobs,
decent homes and a clean environment in which to raise their children. That was 50 years ago. Now that dream, like the town centre, is threadbare and worn. Hope has been replaced by insecurity, and the valiant efforts of local councillors have proved ineffectual in the face of economic recession and central Government neglect.
Nowhere is that neglect more obvious than in our schools. All the hard work in the world cannot hide tatty buildings and tired teachers. Nothing can hide demoralised children. Some of the older children in Stevenage, most especially the older boys, seem to have given up. That is scarcely surprising in a town that has suffered the equivalent of five pit closures-worth of job losses in the past 11 years, with the downsizing of its largest employer, British Aerospace. It is even less surprising in a constituency that has the highest number of unemployed young men in the county.
There are jobs available, but, as local employers such as Glaxo Wellcome constantly tell me, most of our young men are simply not equipped to fill them. That is why this debate is so important, because it is about raising education standards. If we want to raise education standards, we have to start early in our children's lives.
Many of the young men and boys in my constituency started their school lives in large classes. Nineteen out of the 30 primary and infant schools in my constituency have classes of more than 30 for their five, six and seven-year-old pupils. Research in Britain and overseas overwhelmingly demonstrates the value of smaller class sizes to that group of children. If we are to fit our children for the jobs of the 21st century, we must give them a good start. Class sizes alone will not do that. Our children need high-quality nursery education, guaranteed literacy and numeracy standards, after-school clubs, holiday catch-up teams and, of course, good teachers.
That is the programme for which the people of this country voted overwhelmingly last month. It is the programme that we propose to deliver. The people of Stevenage know that, if it is delivered, their children will have a good chance of reading to their actual age or above by the time that they are 11. They also know that, if it is not delivered, their children will find it very hard, if not impossible, to catch up when they enter secondary school; indeed, many of them never will.
Assisted places do deliver excellence, but they deliver excellence for the few, not the many. One of the reasons why they deliver excellence is that--as so many of my hon. Friends have said time after time today--children in private schools are taught in smaller classes. Assisted places deliver excellence, at a price. In 1995-96, the taxpayers of Hertfordshire spent £2,403,000 on assisted places. Most of my constituents would have preferred that money to be spent on employing more teachers--120 teachers, in fact.
Mr. Nick St. Aubyn (Guildford):
Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to make my maiden speech on an issue that is so fraught for the area where I live that I fear that I may feel bound to
First, however, it gives me great pleasure to congratulate the hon. Member for Stevenage (Ms Follett) on her maiden speech. I listened to it with great interest, although it may prove something of a contrast with my own. Indeed, the town that the hon. Lady represents, being one of the newest in the country, is also something of a contrast with the one that I represent--an ancient town on the banks of the Wey.
Guildford, whose name derives from "the golden crossing", today presents a golden opportunity for trade, business and the arts, but above all for education. Guildford's state schools--grant-maintained and LEA-controlled--are a match for any in Britain. If the Government were right in saying that the best in state education would in time eliminate the need for private schools, that would surely be true in Guildford today. Yet in my constituency, more than almost anywhere else, parents--in some cases, nearly one in five--choose to pay to send their children to independent schools. Assisted places widen that choice for those who could not otherwise afford it.
As some hon. Members may know better than I, Guildford also boasts a first-rate college of law. On the Guildford campus, a thriving Surrey university has, over the past 15 years, built one of the most successful science parks in Europe. That is a testament to Tory enterprise economics, but also to the breadth and quality of Guildford's education system and the employees produced by that system.
One measure of the breadth of Guildford's business community is the generous sponsorship that has now been started for our famous Yvonne Arnaud theatre. Just as the theatre in Guildford has sponsored its share of west end stars, so the constituency seat has spawned its share of Westminster stars. Unlike our dear Speaker, none has starred in both the west end and Westminster, although my predecessor David Howell is remembered in the House for his starring role in the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and in Guildford for his sterling work as a constituency Member.
Just after David Howell's retirement was announced, having been Guildford's Member of Parliament for a good 30 years, he received a letter from a constituent. It began, "Dear Mr. Howell, I understand that you have taken over from Dick Nugent as my local Member of Parliament." It is typical of David Howell that, when telling me about the letter, he added, "I am sure that you will make yourself known rather sooner than I did."
In fact, nothing could be harder. In Guildford, Cranleigh, Bramley or any of the other Surrey villages that make my constituency such a pleasant place in which to live--as hon. Members on both sides of the House know only too well--I could not canvass anywhere without hearing of an example of my predecessor's attention and achievement on behalf of his constituents. He will surely make a rich contribution in another place.
David Howell himself started life with an assisted place--at Eton, although in the case of that college the funding of the assisted places was put on a more
permanent basis during the government of Henry VI. That goes to show that the idea of assisted places is not some 1980s Thatcherite construct, but an age-old knowledge viaduct. The stream of talent pulled by the current of assisted places has, over time, benefited the country beyond measure. The kingly endowment that had funded Eton's assisted places for 500-odd years was recently valued at more than £100 million; yet if all that capital were liquidated at once it would not pay for the running of our state schools for one single day. Likewise, liquidating the new Conservative endowment of national assisted places may, according to Ministers, save £100 million by the year 2000, but the opportunities and the learning focus denied to some of our brightest children--which is the real cost of this measure--cannot be quantified.
What will the promised £100 million saving achieve? In my constituency, approximately 400 children have assisted places. The effect of the Bill in Guildford will be that all 400 places will disappear during this Parliament. It will be as though the new Government had sent their task force to our town to close one of our best state schools. Thanks to the long-standing emphasis placed on class sizes by Conservatives on Surrey county council, four out of five of our primary school classes already have fewer than 30 children. I have studied the Bill, and it contains no mechanism to give more money to help the other one in five classes.
Instead, to keep every primary class below 30, more children will be forced to accept their second or third choice of school. Some of the brighter children will be pushed into a higher year, and other children into a lower year. Forcing this narrow party promise through will have a negative effect, because class sizes in Guildford schools will increase.
Since 1509, Guildford has had its own Royal school. Our grammar school often achieves the best A-level rankings of any school in the country. Until 1977, the Royal grammar was a state school. Labour forced it to close its doors to state pupils, but the assisted places scheme has pushed that door ajar again. Today, more than one in 10 of its pupils benefit from that new endowment. One child in 10 benefit at Guildford High School for Girls, at St. Catherine's in Bramley and at many other excellent schools.
In a town that prides itself on its non-selective system for state schools, the flexibility that the assisted places scheme provides is valuable. For some children it is essential. One bright girl lives in the catchment area of a secondary school that teaches almost no A-levels. I met her parents. What could they do? This year, the answer could be an assisted place to give her the education that she needs to put her on her way to university: her primary school teachers maintain that she is fully capable of achieving that. But that will not be the answer next year if the Bill is passed. Whatever the Labour Government may think they are doing, they are slamming the door shut just as the previous Labour Government did.
"a microcosm of the new Britain"--[Official Report, 10 November 1964; Vol. 701, c. 880.],
covers the town of the same name, as well as the villages of Aston, Benington, Codicote, Knebworth and Walkern. The town of Stevenage grew out of a small Anglo-Saxon settlement known as Stithenaece, which means strong oak, and over the centuries it has proved an apt name for a place that has constantly had to adapt to change.
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