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1.18 pm
Mr. Tony McWalter (Hemel Hempstead): I shall try to be brief so as to give other hon. Members the chance to speak. In the interests of brevity, I shall resist the temptation to launch an encomium of the White Paper, which I regard as excellent. It is called, "Excellence in schools" and itself makes the point that excellence can still be improved on. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will not mind if I mention a couple of things that I believe could improve it.
In particular, I should like to draw the attention of the House to two omissions in the White Paper which concern my constituents. The first relates to what might be termed input and the second relates to output.
In respect of input, parents in Hertfordshire do not want their children to go to schools covered by another local education authority, but the education system there is in chaos as a result of the policies of the Conservative Government. When their child is three years old, parents are reduced to begging for a place at a school that is higher up the league table than another school, knowing that it is a feeder school for the secondary school that they want their child eventually to attend. Parents of children aged three and four are engaged in a terrible fight for school places.
As has been said already today, there is no real choice. The parents of children aged four and 10 trek around local schools, trying to make an informed decision about where to send their children, only to find that the number of applicants is sometimes double the number of available places. Many of them turn to the appeals process, which is conducted on the sly by an independent panel, before being told that there is no place for their children at the school of their choice as it was full before the panel met. If they had applied for a place at a popular school, their application falls through the system and large numbers of them feel dumped on.
Many parents who are sufficiently wealthy then say, "A plague on this rotten system--I am going to take my children out of it and pay for them to go to a private school; I will then insulate them from being put into a school that does not meet their educational needs."
The Conservative Government devised a system without much thought or planning. They despised education experts and, as a result, hundreds of parents felt it necessary to pull their children out of the public education system as it did not respond to their needs. The White Paper makes it clear that the system that we have inherited is intolerable and must be changed and that we must seek to provide the resources, encouragement and support that schools require so that the needs of disappointed parents and their neglected children will be met.
My constituents are also concerned about the output of schools. I received a letter from a Roman Catholic priest in my constituency saying that his church is has been repeatedly attacked by youngsters aged 12 or 13 throwing stones at the windows and daubing paint on the building.
Many people feel rightly that parents have a significant responsibility for the unconstrained behaviour of their children. The White Paper makes the point that the way in which children turn out results from a partnership between parents and schools. Many people feel that schools are failing children in that respect. We have to ensure that schools play their part in seeking to change the unacceptable behaviour of their pupils. Some will say that it is a matter for the police, but the problem is not simply that certain kids behave in an unacceptable way which threatens to destroy their welfare and the fabric of their lives; it is that they do not realise that what they are doing is wrong.
That brings me to a very important perspective on the White Paper, in which there is a tiny section on citizenship. Truth to tell, one role that most schools accept is not only to train people in the art of citizenship, but to
train them to think about whether what they are doing with their lives or their time is right or wrong. That is not a simple matter: all of us, both inside and outside the House, in our personal lives, are involved in a moral journey to try to improve our understanding of the ethical dimension of life. The White Paper, however, does not specifically address that dimension: it does not ask schools to do something that the national curriculum fails to do, which is to embed into the schooling process an enhancement of moral understanding, so that at the very least if children in the later stages of their school career behave badly--as we all do, from time to time--they will know that they have behaved badly. They will understand what it is to treat others with respect and to have a moral conscience. That matter is not addressed in the White Paper, and nor are many others.
Mrs. Eleanor Laing (Epping Forest):
I shall be brief, because I am aware that several hon. Members still wish to speak. In particular, I do not wish to deprive the hon. Member for Ilford, North (Ms Perham) of the opportunity to say a few words, because for many years she has been involved in the provision of education in my constituency.
I planned to begin by saying that, of course, we are all in agreement that education matters and is a very high priority in the political outlook on both sides of the House, but, in noting the number of hon. Members present, it occurs to me that it is a great pity that we are having such an important debate on a Friday. I am sure that many colleagues on both sides of the House would have liked to be present to discuss education, but there are even fewer hon. Members on the Government Benches than on the Opposition Benches. Before you criticise me for my arithmetic, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I should say that I was taught proportional fractions at a very early age and I am quite certain that, proportionally, there are more Conservative Members than Labour Members here today.
Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome):
There are even more of us.
Mrs. Laing:
I concede that there are also proportionally more Liberal Democrats than Labour Members here. I am sure that they give high priority to education, as do we all.
In the interests of brevity, I shall confine my remarks to the issue of grant-maintained schools. Some Labour Members have said that the White Paper marks the beginning of a new era of ideas and energy. I am afraid that they are wrong. The ideas and energy in education policy were there throughout the years of Conservative government.
One of the most successful policies that we introduced was the introduction of grant-maintained schools, which was welcomed by hundreds of thousands of parents. In the past eight years, the policy has revolutionised the attitudes and achievements of hundreds of schools and thousands of pupils.
The hon. Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty), who is no longer in the Chamber, criticised people who sit in the corner and say, "No, you can't do this and you can't do that," and take energy away from the provision of education. Grant-maintained schools are one policy through which we brought in energy, but Labour Members said, "No, you can't do that." I remember clearly the Minister for School Standards in another role before he came to the House, trying to stop the setting up of grant-maintained schools in his part of the world at the time, as did others. He did so by such petty actions as stopping the football teams of maintained schools playing against those of grant-maintained schools.
Mrs. Laing:
I entirely agree. If that is not stopping energy coming in to help education, I do not know what is.
Likewise, we introduced assessment and testing, which are important and which the White Paper welcomes and wants to build on. We shall not forget that if it had not been for our policies and the determination of the Conservative Government, there would be no assessment and testing. Teachers would not be able to tell what a child can do, but also what they cannot do, and have the means to assist a child who needs extra help, which is extremely important.
I want to pay a short tribute to the work of the Grant-Maintained Schools Foundation and, in particular, its chairman, Sir Robert Balchin, who has not had enough recognition for his contribution to the education world in the past eight years. He has given his time and energy in an entirely voluntary capacity, to help improve the education of hundreds of thousands of children.
The White Paper talks about the involvement of parents. Grant-maintained schools were the very engine that involved parents in their children's education. By encouraging them to become involved, to sit on the governing bodies and to choose the direction of their children's school, we were giving all parents--not merely those who could afford to pay for it or those already involved in the teaching profession--involvement in their children's education, and giving them the choice that matters so much.
That is not a side issue. Hon. Members have said that what matters is the way in which the White Paper deals with issues that involve everyone. Of course, that matters, but the minorities matter, too. Children who need extra help, those who are particularly talented, children at grant-maintained schools and those in rural as opposed to urban areas all matter, and it is wrong to look only at the generality and ignore the particular.
What worries my constituents and me most is that the White Paper contains no clear proposal for how grant-maintained schools are to go forward. Parents are very concerned about that. Before it came to government,
the Labour party led many of them to believe that they had nothing to fear if they sent their children to grant-maintained schools. Some parents trusted that undertaking, as the result at the ballot box showed us. Their trust on that, as on so many other policies, has been betrayed now that the Labour party is in government.
I want to make three brief points about the way in which grant-maintained schools are treated in the White Paper. The first concerns funding. The White Paper proposes that funding, instead of going directly to grant-maintained schools through the funding agency, should go via local education authorities. As a result, funds will go to bureaucrats, not to children--into offices, not into classrooms.
Bureaucracy is growing again. Instead of concentrating policies on schools and education, we are again talking about who will lay down the rules and what the bureaucrats will do. Power is flowing back to local education authorities and away from parents, teachers and governors.
Non-grant-maintained schools lose about 10 per cent. of their funding to pay for the overheads of local education authorities; grant-maintained schools keep that 10 per cent., but spend only about 5 per cent. of it on overheads and bureaucracy, so they spend the remaining 5 per cent. on providing extra members of staff. Can the Minister give an assurance that schools that are now grant maintained and which may, under the proposals in the White Paper, subsequently be called foundation schools, will be able to keep that 10 per cent? If they lose it, how will he justify the inevitable consequence--that they will make members of staff redundant? Heads and governors of grant-maintained schools want to know that, and that is what matters for the future education of the children in those schools.
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