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5.15 pm
Mr. Clifton-Brown: Much has been said on the amendments, so I shall keep to a few brief remarks.
I should like to take the House back to the atmosphere that prevailed in March and April. Time after time, Conservative Members asked the Labour party, in the unlikely event, as we thought then, of it being elected, to give an expenditure pledge on this or that subject. It is therefore inconceivable that the hon. Member for
Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) would have given a pledge on 11 to 13-year-olds if it had not been cleared by the right hon. Member for Dunfermline, East (Mr. Brown). He must have had it cleared, and the money must have been allocated.
If my maths is correct and it is right that about 2,000 places are involved in extending the assisted places scheme from 11 to 13-year-olds, and we generously assume that the marginal difference between the cost of educating a pupil under the scheme and education in the state system is about £2,000--I think that it is only £1,000 at the most--I calculate the additional cost to be in the region of £4 million. Given that people have based their decisions on their children's educational future on the basis that they would continue to be educated in the private maintained sector until 13, that is not an unreasonable cost.
Mrs. Gillan:
My hon. Friend's mathematics is excellent, but the difference between the cost of a secondary place on the assisted places scheme and a state school place is only about £700 or £800. The sum involved is therefore considerably less.
Mr. Clifton-Brown:
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, but I said that £2,000 was generous and that I thought that it was probably £1,000 or less. She has probably given a more accurate estimate. I ask the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Ms Morris), as she has already been asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff), to give the Government's accurately calculated figure. That would be helpful.
I am delighted to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May). I tried to get her as my next-door neighbour, but it did not quite work out. She has made an excellent start in the House, and I hope that we will hear many more of her contributions, because her grasp of this subject is obviously great. She and my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) made some telling remarks about the human aspect of the matter.
My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry mentioned cases where parents divorce. I have never had to grapple with that subject, and I hope that I never will. However, from friends who have had to grapple with it, I know that it is traumatic for the children. I hope that, even if the hon. Member for Yardley cannot incorporate it into the Bill, she will use the discretion available to her under the various Education Acts sensitively, so that, even if we cannot get a blanket extension for children aged 11 to 13 to continue on the scheme, sensitive human cases will be sympathetically considered.
I can conceive of other difficult cases. As my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry said, if a local education authority operates a middle school system for children to the age of 12 and the assisted places scheme stops at the age of 11, children will have to change to one school and then to another at 13. Changing school always sets back a child's academic education, as we all know from our own children. Again, I hope that the Under-Secretary will be able to exercise her discretion in that circumstance.
A third category of human difficulty is that of a really bright child on the assisted places scheme who might get a scholarship to a privately maintained secondary school. He or she would have to leave the primary maintained
school to go to a secondary school before getting a scholarship to continue further in the private system. That would mean further disruption for a child who, under normal circumstances, would not have expected it.
Amendment No. 28 deals with the type of state schools that might be available. Many of the best state schools have a waiting list--that is certainly the case in my constituency. Often, it is not possible for a child to get into the preferred school. Again, it may be a case of a child leaving an assisted place at 11 to go to a state school that may not have been his or her first choice. Great difficulties could be involved. The child might have to travel further from home and might not be with his or her friends or with relations who had attended the school nearest the home. Those are all individual circumstances that need to be taken into account.
Amendment No. 28 incorporates a number of features that must be taken into consideration. For example, the state school available might not be suitable on religious grounds for a child coming out of the private system. What would happen if a child had attended a private school with assisted places money, but the religious ethos of the state school nearest to his or her home was different? A child might be particularly gifted in music or sport, but the local state school might not have those facilities.
I am keen to ensure that all state schools have a wide curriculum. That is why the previous Government, with which my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) was involved, produced the White Paper "Sport: Raising the Game". I am keen for all our state schools to have good sports facilities.
Parental choice is what matters most in the extension of the assisted places scheme from the age of 11 to 13. After all, parents expected when they put their children into the private system with assisted places money that their child would stay there until the age of 13. If a parent has an expectation and the Government give a pledge--even when they are in opposition--under all the rules of basic justice, that pledge should be honoured. I appeal to right hon. and hon. Members on the Government Front Bench to honour that pledge. A small amount of money is involved and the parents affected have a right to expect that it will be honoured.
Mr. Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire):
I will be brief, as others want to speak on this group of amendments.
I rise to support amendments Nos. 11, 3 and 28. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) made a number of telling points very eloquently. First, he referred to the human aspect of the Bill and how it will impact on children. It is important for us to recognise that we are talking about individual children within a peer group in a school who will be removed from that peer group as a consequence of this Bill. It is not simply a matter of those children transferring to another school inside the maintained sector, which may or may not be able to meet the child's needs as well as the school that he or she was attending. Clearly, in the parents' view, the school that the child was attending under the assisted places scheme offered them facilities and choice that were not available in the maintained sector.
There is a human aspect above and beyond that. Having made a choice on behalf of their children, parents had the reasonable expectation that their child would be able to proceed along that path. In addition, the children had become familiar with and very much a part of the school and its ethos. All of us with children know that, if they become attached to a school of any kind, leaving is a wrench and can have a deleterious impact on their education if they think that the way they are removed is unfair.
Secondly, my hon. Friend the Member forMid-Worcestershire referred to schools that appear to have a different character, but are in reality the same school, with a continuing ethos that runs from the primary to the secondary school. There is an example of just such in south Cambridgeshire. St. Faith's school enjoys the same charity number and the same Department for Education and Employment number as the Leys school. Parents of children attending St. Faith's have the expectation that their children will continue to the Leys when they are 13.
That brings me to the point of the amendment that deals with the impact on children who would normally be in a school until the age of 13 but who will be required, under the circumstances foreseen by the Government, to leave at 11. I shall not continue at length, as my hon. Friends have explained the case more eloquently than I could.
Parents clearly had reasonable expectations when they chose a school. Those expectations were reinforced as recently as April this year, when the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) said that, if children had commenced at a school, they would be able to continue until the age of 13. I fear that we may have discovered during this debate and from the Government's actions in moving the hon. Gentleman into the recesses of the Cabinet Office that, whereas we believed that there was a doctrine of collective responsibility on the part of the Government, there seems to be a doctrine of collective irresponsibility where pledges made in advance of the election are concerned.
In those circumstances, it was reasonable for parents to expect that their children would be able to proceed until the age of 13. For that reason, the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) was right to draw our attention to the fact that the Government made a pledge and that it is one that should be honoured, not broken.
As I said on Second Reading and when speaking on an earlier amendment--I think that the Minister said this from a sedentary position earlier--the Government argue that, if children are required to leave schools that they attended under the assisted places scheme, it is acceptable for them to revert to the maintained sector--which indeed it may be for some, but it is important for the Government to recognise that parents have made their choices for diverse reasons.
St. Mary's in south Cambridgeshire, for example, is a single-sex school with a Roman Catholic orientation. That brings me back to amendment No. 28. It is incumbent on Ministers to answer this point. If there is no school of the character that I have described, it is not sufficient for them to say that children must revert to the maintained sector and that that is good enough and they are in exactly the same position as all other children. If no choice of school is available to parents, where do Ministers expect their
children to go? On what basis are Ministers removing that choice? I want the Minister to clarify the situation in her reply.
Representations made to me by schools in my constituency seem to show that they foresee a time when children over the age of 11--when they would normally transfer to the maintained sector--in schools that take pupils up to the age of 13 may continue for one or two academic years and then, aged 13, be asked to transfer to the maintained sector. That may not be convenient; it may be difficult for those children to transfer into a new peer group and a new class of pupils who have been at that school for a couple of years.
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