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Mr. Maude: Perhaps my hon. Friend knows.
Mr. Steen: I wonder whether my hon. Friend can help my understanding of what the Government are trying to do. All the schools in my constituency are full. Each year, 1,011 children join the assisted places scheme. Where will those 1,011 children go when the Government get rid of the scheme? I cannot get an answer to that from the Government, so perhaps my hon. Friend can help me.
8 pm
Mr. Maude: I would love to help my hon. Friend; it is a question I have been asking. My constituency contains one of the great historic educational establishments in this country, Christ's Hospital. Like my old school of Abingdon, Christ's Hospital has always had the historic mission of providing outstanding education solely for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Most of the support for those children comes from its own foundation. Because of the generosity of philanthropists over the century, the school has a large foundation which is used in the best possible way to help children from disadvantaged families. It also takes up places under the assisted places scheme, and it does a terrific job for those children.
As in my hon. Friend's constituency, most of the schools in my constituency are full. It is an area with an expanding population. I do not know where those children who are denied the opportunity to take up an assisted place, at Christ's Hospital and other local schools, will go. We want the Minister to answer those questions, but we see no sign of him doing so.
I want to make another point about the destructive kernel of the Bill, which is contained in this clause. It relates to the way it was justified by the Prime Minister and other Front-Bench spokesmen during and before the election campaign. They said that the assisted places scheme was a subsidy to the private sector, making it appear that profiteering organisations were making money out of the scheme. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that that remark was made out of simple ignorance and was not a deliberate distortion of the truth. The Minister will correct me if I am being too generous--[Interruption.] Perhaps the Government are too arrogant to admit that they are wrong and apologise. That was made abundantly clear yesterday.
The soundbite use to justify the Bill is that the scheme is a subsidy to the private sector. That is wrong. For reasons that I have explained, I know Abingdon school better than most. There, every assisted place is subsidised by the school to the tune of £750 a year. It does no service to the finances of Abingdon school to take on boys with assisted places. Indeed, the school would be considerably better off without assisted places. It is a flourishing school that can fill its places with boys paying full fees. Abolition
of assisted places is not a problem for the school--but it is a problem for the boys who would have had those places. Incidentally, those places are subsidised by the full-fee-paying boys.
If the Bill is passed, that school, against its wishes, will become more exclusive and more elitist. It will continue to provide excellent education, but only for those who can afford it. Because we take seriously our mission to provide excellent schooling for disadvantaged children, we, like other schools, will do our best to provide assistance through our foundation--meagre though it is at Abingdon--so that the benefits of a social mix and excellent education can be provided as widely as possible. However, it will be difficult. The inevitable, destructive truth is that schools like Abingdon will be able to spread their benefits less widely.
When the Minister replies, I hope that he will make a better fist of justifying the Bill than he has done so far. All that I have heard from him and his colleagues is the language of destruction. They do not like the scheme because it is for the few. As my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham said, there are plenty of schemes that are for the few, but I do not hear the Government proposing to abolish them. Perhaps they will do that later. When the Minister gets going with his binge of arrogant and destructive activity, perhaps he will tell us that there is more to come. The language is one of dogmatism, spite, destruction and envy. It is an arrogant determination to drive the Bill through, regardless of its merits and regardless of the children who will be affected.
The arrogant way in which the Minister disdains to answer the questions put to him makes me think that he is ashamed of the Bill. I will do him the credit of believing that he wants to improve education overall and that deep in his heart he knows that the Bill goes in the other direction. He knows that the assisted places scheme provides, at a modest cost per place, an excellent education for a moderate number of disadvantaged children.
Mr. Maude:
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman if he will answer our questions.
Mr. Byers:
Will the hon. Gentleman, who is the chairman of the governors of Abingdon school, tell us why, if the assisted places scheme is so popular and such a success, of the 106 places available at the school in 1996-97, only 89 have been taken up?
Mr. Maude:
Some governors saw the hon. Gentleman coming. They heard his vindictive language, and that of his colleagues. They thought--I tried to persuade them that they were wrong, but I failed--that a Labour Government might be coming and that the first thing they would do was to act in this vindictive and malicious way and destroy the scheme. They therefore reluctantly decided to wind down the number of places. It was very much against their wishes. The governors--this is true of all assisted places schools--would have preferred the scheme to remain, albeit at some financial cost to the school, so that the school could continue with its historic
Mr. Michael Jack (Fylde):
I want to address my remarks to the first few lines of clause 1, in particular the words
I declare an interest in that my wife is a state school teacher. Because of her experience, especially in reception and primary classes, I have some knowledge of some of the reasons that lie behind the Government's arguments justifying the Bill.
It is true that, in certain circumstances, the size of a class can have an effect on the ability of the teacher to control it and provide good-quality education for the pupils in his or her care. During the general election campaign, when the matter first came up for discussion, I was much taken by Ofsted's report on the issue. It made it clear that it was the quality of education that counted above all else--it was the quality of the teaching rather than the absolute number of pupils in a class.
I watched on the parliamentary television link earlier as the Minister refused to give the Committee any information in answer to specific questions. I oppose the clause standing part of the Bill because we have no idea of the effects of the measure. It is like me giving a friend a blank cheque and telling him to go away and fill in the details later, hoping that my account will have the balance to stand it.
My right hon. and hon. Friends have sought information about the effects of the clause and argued that the scheme should not cease to have effect. They have been trying to elicit answers about finances. I am amazed that any Minister should come before a Committee unable to do better than say that, if the clause had effect, he might have £100 million by the end of the Parliament. The fact that he is unable to give us details of the phased release of the money, unable to give us details of how the money would be given to local authorities and unable to give us an assurance that the money would find its way directly to primary school classrooms is--or, to be grammatically correct, are--three good reasons why the clause should not stand part of the Bill.
The Government claim to have an interest in the people of Britain, but the little people of Britain will lose out as a result of the clause. I remember meeting Mr. and Mrs. Smith--they are real people--when I lived in Southport 15 years ago. Ellen Smith used to go out and do cleaning jobs to earn enough money to add to her husband's salary of £8,500 so that they could make their contribution to the assisted place for their bright son to go to Merchant Taylors' school in Liverpool. Those are the people whom the Labour party might at one time have thought of as their natural supporters, but the clause is designed to trample on the Ellen Smiths of this world and their children and deny them the choice and opportunity that allowed that young man go on to obtain a first-class degree at university. The Southport area did not have all the options that the Minister may tell me there might be in his brave new world of education.
I acknowledge that there is some logic in the Bill from the Minister's point of view. However, before the election, I asked my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) about the scheme. She wrote to me last November, saying that officials in the Department for Education and Employment had calculated a net saving of £34 million, not taking into account any capital expenditure that would have to be made on secondary schools to accommodate those pupils not going on the assisted places scheme.
I kept that letter with me until a public meeting on the subject during the election campaign. When I pulled out the Minister's letter, which I had treasured for the occasion, and quoted the figure, my Labour opponent--this gave us an idea of the arrogance of the Government--said, "You're wrong. You can't believe Government figures." The same officials are now advising the Minister. He is already disagreeing with his officials, and a representative of his party says that the official figures are wrong.
"shall cease to have effect".
I want to explain why I do not believe that the Bill should proceed--and clause 1 is clearly essential to the Bill. I believe that the assisted places scheme should continue.
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