| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Foster: I should like to make a little progress if the hon. Gentleman does not mind.
The Minister was keen to deal with the Green Paper on teachers' pay. The House will be interested to know what she said in a press release issued by the Department on 25 February, just a few days ago:
It does not matter whether the proposal is right or wrong, because independent people have done an analysis of the amount of work involved and have found that it will take the head teacher of an 850-strong comprehensive with 45 staff more than 100 hours to carry out the necessary appraisal--assuming 32 per cent. of teachers want to be appraised for the next stage, and excluding the time that governors will have to spend on it. That undoubtedly places an additional burden on schools.
The hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Dr. Turner) asked me what proposals I would not put into practice. I shall give him a couple of examples. The current bidding system--Labour's long odds education lottery--is a good example of the centralisation of education provision. It has placed enormous burdens on schools, which have to provide all the data that the local education authorities need to make their bids.
I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is aware that, since the Government came to power, a grand total of over 16,000 bids for funds have been made by local education authorities on behalf of schools up and down the land. Of those 16,000 bids, 10,000 have failed. Think of the enormous amount of bureaucracy, effort and red tape people in our schools and LEAs have had to face to make bids that have not even been successful.
In some parts of the country, the situation is even worse. In Oxfordshire, a grand total of 1,115 bids have been made, and 1,002 of them have failed. The inordinate amount of time spent by officers and people in our schools on that procedure is horrendous. I would get rid of large chunks of the bidding system.
If the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk wants a good example of the penny packets to which the hon. Member for Havant referred, I suggest that he examines the Government's proposal for a children's Parliament. It got wonderful headlines, and everyone thought that the Government were doing wonderful things--until they looked at the figures. Each participating school will receive £10. The paperwork required for the bid costs more than that, let alone the support for schools.
Dr. George Turner:
The hon. Gentleman seems to be losing sight of the big picture. I spent years on an education committee watching the backlog of building work grow. The schools in my patch have welcomed the opportunity to make their case to have their school buildings renovated, improved and added to. They want to be able to bid, because they do not want bureaucrats in Whitehall telling them where their priorities should lie. With what would the hon. Gentleman replace the bidding system? Would he let civil servants decide which schools get the money?
Mr. Foster:
If the hon. Gentleman served on a local education authority, surely he should accept that a more appropriate method is for the local education authority to be able to allocate the funds. He does not seem willing to distinguish between some of the good proposals that the Government have introduced and those that impose additional burdens.
Liberal Democrats have praised and welcomed some of the Government's proposals. I have sometimes acknowledged that they are worth while even though they would, in certain circumstances, increase the burden on schools. However, I have also produced evidence from teachers, governors and head teachers to show that some proposals create unnecessary bureaucracy in our schools and are damaging the Government's ability to raise standards.
In their desire to capture the education headlines almost on a daily basis, the Labour Government have failed to recognise that they are deprofessionalising teaching and demoralising governors. Without those teachers and governors, the legitimate standards agenda will not be achieved.
A senior Government education policy adviser, quoted in the latest edition of the Education Journal, gave the game away. He was asked why there could not be a let-up in the flow of initiatives. He replied:
Mr. Gordon Marsden (Blackpool, South):
There are times when I hear Conservative Members speaking in the House and think that I am in some sort of post-modern "Alice in Wonderland" world where things are getting curiouser and curiouser. I am sad that the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) seems to have associated himself with that position.
As my hon. Friend the Minister made perfectly clear, what we have heard from the Conservative party bears no relation to its record in government. I am afraid that I am going to take Conservative Members back to that record
in government, particularly on centralisation. There were two education Acts: one in 1988 and the other in 1993. The Education Reform Act 1988 had 238 sections, and the Education Act 1993 had 308 sections; 1,000 amendments and 55 new clauses were tabled; and more than 400 new powers were given to Ministers as a consequence of the 1993 Act.
The Conservative party's education policy was in constant turmoil over that period. There were four Secretaries of State for Education between 1989 and 1992. It is well known that the Conservatives brought us mad cow disease in the 1980s, but they also managed to bring mad Maoism--the doctrine of permanent revolution. There was such mad Maoism that, according to the magazine with which I was involved at the time, history teachers were tearing their hair out. HMI inspectors were driven to distraction by the amount of regulation produced by the Conservative Government and by the chopping and changing. Things moved on every time Mrs. Thatcher fished in her handbag for a new draft of the national curriculum, or every time she listened to some barmy, right-wing educationist. Constant changes were made. The only positive result was the introduction of the Baker days, when the poor, hard-pressed teachers were given time to catch up on the paperwork. That was the record of the Conservative party during that period.
The hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) referred to setting schools free, which is a fairly waffly thing to say. Were the Conservatives setting schools free when the much-vaunted funding agency for grant-maintained schools was directed from Whitehall by John Patten? We had centralisation and Maoism, and I would not have been surprised if they had have sent teachers into the fields to learn how to tithe and to collect the corn.
In that period, we also had the nationalisation of education policy. Bureaucracy was piled upon bureaucracy. To give him credit, the hon. Member for Bath referred to the nursery voucher paperchase. The assisted places scheme helped only 60,000 children out of 7 million. There were even some good ideas, such as local management of schools and governors, but the difficulties were compounded by the lack and training and time provided.
The consequences were there for all to see. The Audit Commission found that, in real terms, there had been a cut of £44 per primary school pupil and of £110 per secondary school pupil between 1994 and 1997. Back-room bureaucrats had a field day under the Tories, while front-line services suffered. The legacy of that bureaucracy was this: 500,000 primary school children in classes of 30 or more, a chronic crisis in recruitment and teaching and unacceptable standards in literacy and numeracy. No wonder Steve Norris, the former Conservative Member of Parliament for Epping Forest, said:
Mr. Marsden:
I agree, but that is amply made up for by the chutzpah and brass neck that we are hearing from the Opposition Front Bench.
Mr. Christopher Fraser (Mid-Dorset and North Poole):
Given the hon. Gentleman's obvious mastery of the subject, will he concede that, proportionally, the parliamentary Labour party has fewer members present than the Conservatives?
Mr. Marsden:
If the hon. Gentleman examines the record of Labour Members' attendance of education debates here and, for that matter, in Standing Committees, he will find that our record is far superior to that of members of his party. [Hon. Members: "And this is an Opposition day."] Indeed it is.
Given the background, it is not surprising that the then Conservative education Ministers approached the School Standards and Framework Bill, enacted in 1998, with a certain amount of confusion and schizophrenia. Those of us who served on the Standing Committee witnessed, time after time, confusion over whether they should or should not accept the Bill's basic principles, and we are witnessing the same confusion this evening. What do the Conservatives oppose, and what alternatives do they suggest? Why are they in such difficulty?
It is a shame that the hon. Member for Havant is no longer present. In deference to his interest in philosophy, I was going to say that, essentially, the Conservatives' problem is one of philosophy. They have so mired and encrusted themselves over 18 years in their jaundiced view of the public-service ethos that they are incapable of distinguishing between enabling and empowering--what the present Government are doing for education--and the Stalinist direction of which their own Lady Thatcher was so enamoured.
The Conservatives really have only two models. One is mad market chaos--grant-maintained schools versus the rest; city technology colleges versus the rest; assisted places versus the rest. The other, which we saw in spades when they were in government, is centralisation, stamping out dissent and local education authority initiatives. The Opposition seem to sign up to a Hobbesian view of education--except that, in their case, rather than being nasty, brutish and short, it is nasty, smug and hideously complex. They are incapable of understanding, or unwilling to understand, the models of co-operation and collaboration offered by the present Government through initiatives such as education action zones and beacon schools.
We shall not intervene where it is not necessary. Where schools are working well and raising standards, there will be a light touch. My hon. Friend the Minister has said as much on previous occasions in respect of Ofsted. If there are problems, however, we will act: we will intervene, as the Government intervened over Hackney. That intervention can only be compared with the futile way in which the right hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard), the former Secretary of State, dealt with Calderdale and Nottinghamshire.
We are setting targets for the raising of standards. We are encouraging local education authorities with educational development plans; we are encouraging people to learn from best practice. The results are transparent: a 5 per cent. increase in spending per annum, an extra £200 million for homework centres,1,200 numeracy and literacy schools this summer, the inclusion of nutritional standards for school meals for the first time in 18 years, and education action zones to tackle under-achievement. I hope that before long there will be one in my constituency.
"Some of the criticism we have heard is that appraisal, as proposed, will be far too bureaucratic. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are proposing a cycle which need not be unwieldy or place an additional burden on school life."
She suggests that the proposals in the Green Paper will not place an additional burden on school life. I do not know where the Minister is living, because she is certainly not living in the real world.
"The public will think we have run out of steam."
The problem is that without a let-up from the unnecessary burdens, schools will run out of steam long before the Government do.
8.25 pm
"Our failure to improve the level of public education is one of the areas Conservatives have got to be most concerned about and frankly ashamed of".
Mr. David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire):
Will my hon. Friend add to his sad list of statistics the fact that 158 members of Her Majesty's Opposition are not present for the debate? That suggests that at least 96 per cent. of Opposition Members are showing, on their own
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |