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Mr. Blunkett: She certainly will.
Mrs. Gillan: I take that as a firm pledge to abolish independent schools and private education. If Labour's promises can be so rapidly brought to the top of the agenda, how long before the rest of that pledge is fulfilled?
Quoting the Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Bath said that the independent sector will not go away, but it could be destroyed. The political will was obvious in the speeches by Labour Members today and in what the Secretary of State murmured from a sedentary position.
Mr. Blunkett:
Will the hon. Lady confirm that the former Member for Buckingham, George Walden, has described the division in our education system as apartheid? Accepting and acknowledging that one thing damages another is not the same as threatening its demise, and the hon. Lady knows that. A little common sense might not be a bad thing in this debate. Some intelligence in the Chamber would edify the general debate about standards in education.
Mrs. Gillan:
I shall come back to the word "apartheid". The Secretary of State has risen to the bait. He muttered from a sedentary position that he would let the hon. Member for Yardley supervise the destruction of independent schools.
Ms Estelle Morris:
I had no intention of intervening on the hon. Lady, but she has gone too far. She was in Committee when I made the comments that she has quoted and she knows that before those remarks I said that we had no intention of abolishing the independent sector. We believe that the actions of some schools have an effect on other schools in the communities that they seek to serve. My comments that she has referred to in the House today were that and nothing more. She should not make suppositions beyond that in the Chamber or anywhere else. There has never been a threat from me or from anyone else on the Government Benches to abolish the independent sector. She should address the Bill, which is about giving opportunity to children, not about abolishing the independent sector.
Mrs. Gillan:
The hon. Lady had better consult the record; I said that it was her personal opinion. I did not put words into the Secretary of State's mouth; he spoke from a sedentary position.
The indecent haste with which the Bill has entered the parliamentary timetable is deplorable. The Bill adds nothing to the education of children; instead, it takes something valuable away. The Government have trumpeted their belief in educational standards although they have a record of opposing everything we did to improve the performance of our state education system, whether it was testing, publishing results or the national curriculum.
Have the Government stopped for a second to draw breath and to look at the results achieved by assisted places pupils? No. They have not considered the results achieved by those pupils as worth a second glance. To the Government, those results are not considered valuable or worth while. The number of pupils in the state system who achieved five GCSEs at grades A to C stands at 41.7 per cent. The results from assisted places pupils are twice that, standing at 91.6 per cent., and the A-level results exceeded 95 per cent. Those results, however, have been unceremoniously ignored.
Surely a Government so genuinely concerned about standards would have waited a while before pulling the rug from under a future generation of bright children.
Surely they would have allowed children to continue in what is self-evidently a system that is achieving good results for them. After all, the Government are conducting reviews, conducting consultations and producing White Papers right, left and centre. Why not here? Why do they not take a breath--take a step backwards--and examine the wealth in the assisted places scheme? If the Government had real confidence in their policies to improve school standards, the assisted places scheme would wither on the vine because parents would no longer want to send their children to private schools, but would send them to the local school because it could offer the same education.
But no, the Government are in a hurry. After 18 long years of brooding, they would rather take precipitate and vindictive action and abolish the scheme long before any further improvements can be made in the state sector--indeed, arguably before they can be made at all. This, their flagship education policy, is one of dogma and it contains a very dangerous principle. The principle is that it ensures that freedom of choice will be capable of being bought only by the wealthy and can never be aspired to by the less well-off. In one fell swoop, the Government are creating educational apartheid. There will be private schools for the wealthy who have the luxury of being able to buy choice and state schools or charity for everyone else. At a time when others are ending apartheid, the Labour Government are starting it in education and they should be ashamed.
There are almost 38,000 pupils in the scheme in Great Britain and almost 11,000 will enter the scheme in 1997 before it is snatched away by this legislation. Indeed, before the election, the Secretary of State callously agreed to my extending the scheme for one year for prep schools just to get more money into the scheme so that, when he abolished it, he would have more savings to make. Even so, the children involved are only 1 per cent. of the secondary school population and less than 20 per cent. of those attending private schools.
Those children, however, are receiving a first-class education that is best suited to their abilities and attributes. Labour needs to realise that not all children are the same; one style of education does not fit all pupils. The bottom line of the Bill is to remove one more choice of education style not from the wealthy, but often from the poorest in our society.
The Government produced two further soundbites as the reason for this mean little Bill. They said that they would use the savings to reduce class sizes and that they would govern for the many, not for the few. Surely by now they have found out that those soundbites carry little truth or accuracy and are merely gestures without substance.
Most of us would agree that, other things being equal, smaller class sizes could be advantageous, although the more discerning, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead, pointed out that the quality of the teacher is far more significant. We are deceived on two counts: first, on the financial outcome of abolition and, secondly, on the number of children involved. The savings from abolishing the scheme amount, so the Minister for School Standards said in a written answer, to £100 million, but the cost of educating 38,000 pupils in the state sector at an average of £2,800 a year each comes to £106 million alone. The Institute of Public Finance Ltd. estimates that the maximum accumulative savings by 2000 will come to only £34 million.
The Minister will argue that some parents will still pay for their children, but I doubt that, since 80 per cent. of pupils who take up assisted places come from homes with an income below the national average and many would be hard pressed to make the sacrifice of paying for their children's education.
The Government have pledged that they will bring down class sizes. That is only a half-truth. The truth is that smaller class sizes may be achievable in the next few years, not, as the Government would have us believe through their efforts or the abolition of assisted places, but because the birth rate is falling. The truth is that the birth rate has fallen since the start of the 1990s, and that is reflected in the number of children under 10 years old projected for 2001. Other than spite and an old grudge that the Labour party is bringing to fruition, there is even less reason to introduce the measure.
What do we see in the financial effects of the Bill? We see repeated the dubious promise to create savings to reduce class sizes. There is no guarantee of any significant savings, no mention of how savings will be identified, no estimate of how much they will amount to and no mention of how they will be ring-fenced to ensure that they are put to the stated use. Even worse, there is no recognition of the cost involved in educating the children affected in the state sector. The Bill is effectively uncosted.
The Minister for School Standards (Mr. Stephen Byers):
I thank the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) for her initial comments. I am sure that all Government Front Benchers would welcome her warm words.
A record number of maiden speeches have been made in this debate. As I understand it, about 18 have been made. At one time, it was rather like a Cook's tour--although given the present Foreign Secretary, that is perhaps not an appropriate term to use.
The hon. Members for Poole (Mr. Syms), for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes), for East Worthing and Shoreham (Mr. Loughton), for Guildford (Mr. St. Aubyn), for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson), for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) and for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) all spoke with a passion to defend and represent their constituents' interests--misguided perhaps, but clearly believing in the views that they expressed. It was delightful to hear an old timer, the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington) make a thoughtful contribution to the debate.
Among those who spoke from the Liberal Benches, it was interesting to note that the hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch) is intending to set up an all-party cider club. I am sure that many hon. Members will be interested in joining it. I welcome the contribution made by the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster)--who speaks for the Liberal Democrats on education--and his broad support for the Bill.
A number of my hon. Friends made highly significant maiden speeches. They are fully aware of the fact that one of the key pledges on which the Labour party stood for office and--I believe--one of the reasons for our overwhelming victory on 1 May was to reduce class sizes for five, six and seven-year-olds with the money that we will receive from phasing out the assisted places scheme. My hon. Friends the Members for Reading, East (Ms Griffiths), for Forest of Dean (Mrs. Organ), for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. McCabe), for Worcester (Mr. Foster), for Stevenage (Ms Follett) and for Cleethorpes (Ms McIsaac) all articulated the view that that was one of the main reasons why we received such a vote on 1 May.
I was delighted to hear the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Mr. Reed) because I was his twinned Member of Parliament during the election campaign and for a few months before hand. My hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr. Campbell), who represents a neighbouring constituency to mine, also made his maiden speech. We share the same local education authority of North Tyneside, and I know that we will ensure that that LEA continues to deliver its current high quality education.
My hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Ms Flint) spoke for many when she referred to the sterling work of Martin Redmond in representing the interests of his Don Valley constituents in the House. A small fact of which my hon. Friend may not be aware is that it was in Don Valley that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State nearly drowned while learning to sail at Hadfield marina. I hope that that did not occur on a boat built by Swan Hunter in my former constituency. I am delighted that my right hon. Friend survived.
We also had a speech from one of what we call the retreads, my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East (Dr. Kumar). I am delighted to welcome him back to the House. When Middlesbrough became a unitary authority I was invited to speak at the first meeting of the education committee. I know that it shares the Government's commitment to raising standards.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) spoke with his usual strength about the inequalities of educational opportunities in his inner-city constituency, which are made worse as a result of the assisted places scheme.
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