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Mr. Hilary Benn (Leeds, Central): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Lidington: I will give way briefly.
Mr. Benn: I thank the hon. Gentleman.
If comprehensive reform has been such a failure--and that seems to fly in the face of the evidence of a rise in educational attainments and achievements since its introduction--will the hon. Gentleman explain why there is absolutely no evidence that parents wish to return to a widespread system of selection? Does he accept that, as the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) suggested, no parents want their children to attend secondary modern schools?
Mr. Lidington:
The evidence with which I am most familiar--from my own constituency, where a selective system has been maintained consistently--shows that there is considerable public support, as demonstrated in local election results, for a selective system. The approach in areas that have opted for a comprehensive system should be to develop the initiatives of the previous
Sixth forms were one of the subjects dealt with in the Government's recent White Paper. I should, at the outset, say that I think that the idea of encouraging co-operation between local education authority schools and colleges is sensible, and that, equally, I fully support the Government's announced emphasis on trying to raise the standards of those who are not the highest fliers academically.
One of my fears--I hope that, in his reply, the Minister will allay some of them--is that the Government have a hidden agenda. Despite the assurances that the Secretary of State gave in his statement, the current edition of The Times Educational Supplement remarks that only
One fear is that the Government are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. The Government have promised to maintain sixth form funding at current levels in real terms, but they have already said that they will not provide extra money to school sixth forms to cope with the proposed new A-level curriculum. I wonder whether Ministers have a similar plan to cap sixth form grant or expenditure in subsequent Department for Education and Employment initiatives.
Mr. Blizzard:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Lidington:
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I shall not, as other hon. Members wish to speak.
There is a risk of a top-down system that relies not on the preference expressed by students or their parents, but on the decisions of central planners on a regional committee.
What will happen to capital expenditure decisions? Who will take them? I am very interested in the answer to that question, as the population of Aylesbury--and of mid-Buckinghamshire generally--is growing fast and, at some point in the not-too-distant future, my constituency
may need another secondary school. Under the Government's new proposals, how would a decision on accommodation for post-16 education be taken?
Do the Government have a view on the minimum size of a viable sixth form? In the previous Parliament, when I was on the Education Select Committee, one expert witness said that 250 was the bare minimum.
Mr. Don Foster:
Three in a primary school.
Mr. Lidington:
Am I am being bid up to 300 by Liberal Democrat Members?
Mr. Malcolm Wicks (Croydon, North):
I welcome the debate on choice and diversity. Soon we shall approach the end of the century, our first of full democracy and citizenship. Universal suffrage came for the first time, and this century enjoyed the advent of the welfare state and the national health service. The provision of state education also arrived for primary school children and, with the Education Act 1944, for secondary school children, too. It is interesting to note how recently state secondary education arrived.
We ought to try to relate two sets of themes. Equality and fairness sometimes seem to conflict with diversity and choice, but they need not. The new agenda facing education is how we relate those two themes to each other. The advent of state education for every child brought the principle of equality into practice. Each and every child was important and deserved good state education. The left and right of British politics may have talked differently about equality, focusing on equality of opportunity or some more fundamental form of equality, but all of us agreed on the goal of equal provision for every child.
It is useful to review the results of our first century of citizenship and democracy. I do not have the time to do a full audit, but there have been successes and failures. Numeracy and literacy have risen and more of our children have been able to achieve good GCSEs and A-levels. It is fantastic that about a third of our children will go to university. One day it will be 40 per cent., and perhaps one day 50 per cent. That is a remarkable success story.
However, the success is blended with some failure. Gross inequalities have continued in our society in education and in many other matters. It is a sorry fact that knowing which house or estate a child came from, or knowing his or her postcode or his or her parents' occupations, allowed us to make a good--though not always accurate; there are many exceptions--stab at
predicting that child's educational outcome. We could also predict the child's broader life chances in health and in many other areas.
The annual report of the Universities and Colleges Admission Service shows that only 10 per cent. of university entrants came from social classes 4 and 5, although those classes represent nearly a quarter of the population. That is a gross inequality. The youth cohort study shows that by 1996, eight out of 10 state school pupils from professional families gained at least five good GCSEs, while only a fifth of children from households in which no one was in paid employment achieved the same. Despite our successes, which I applaud, at the end of our first century of state education, the system still mirrors inequalities rather than breaking them down.
Equality and fairness are among the great themes of our century; diversity and choice provide the other important strand. The 1944 Act had its own agenda on diversity and choice. Although it brought in secondary schools, it also brought in grammar schools, technical schools that never developed in any great quantity, and secondary modern schools. Later, Labour Governments in particular pushed comprehensive schools and we got into the debate about the comprehensive school versus the grammar school. I agree with the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) that that debate has become rather old-fashioned. Equality and diversity appear to have been in conflict in the public and private sectors.
Although many working-class children go to grammar schools, there is still an equation between socio-economic background and access to grammar school. I was struck by the evidence printed in Hansard on 20 May that used free school meals as an indicator of socio-economic disadvantage. It tells us how many children at grammar schools receive free school meals and compares that figure with the number of children in the relevant local education authorities who were receiving free school meals. In Barnet, 16 per cent. of children attending secondary schools receive free school meals, compared with 1.4 per cent. of those attending grammar schools. In Bromley, 14 per cent. of children receive free school meals, compared with 1.2 per cent. of children at grammar schools. In Birmingham, 34 per cent. of children receive free school meals, compared with only 5 per cent. of children at grammar schools. In Liverpool, 39 per cent. of all secondary school children receive free school meals, compared with just 6 per cent. of children at grammar schools. In Buckinghamshire, which is a pretty wealthy county, 7 per cent. of children receive free school meals compared with just 1.6 per cent. of those at grammar schools. The point is proven.
Some of my right hon. and hon. Friends ask those who support grammar schools to say more about the children who never get to grammar school--in other words, most children. We have to recognise the skew in terms of socio-economic background. It is not surprising, but it is worth emphasising.
Let me change gear now and say that the Select Committee on Education and Employment, which I have the honour to chair, is interested in these themes. We are about to undertake an inquiry into the relationship between public and private education. Owing to the involvement of the private sector in education action zones and other developments in which--perfectly properly, in my view--the Government are trying to bridge the gap between public and private education, we
feel it appropriate and timely that the Select Committee should undertake an inquiry into the role of private companies in the management and supply of state education services. We take our first evidence on 10 July and I hope that our report will be of interest to the whole House.
Another illustration of the need for diversity and choice is the necessity to pay more attention to highly able children. The Government prefer the term "gifted" children. I am not worried about the terminology, but we are all concerned--as was the Select Committee when we published our report--by the fact that most schools neglect highly able children. To put it rather graphically, a number of potential Nobel prize winners are sitting in our schools rather sulkily, bored out of their minds because they are not being stretched. That is partly because schools are often more concerned with helping children who are struggling and with average standards.
We neglect the highly able child at our peril, however. The Select Committee made the strong recommendation that every primary and secondary school should have a senior member of staff as a co-ordinator, looking out for the highly able boy or girl.
I said at the beginning that this was the end of the first century of democracy and citizenship in our society. In the education agenda, we find ourselves hovering rather anxiously between three centuries. I do not think that anyone would have predicted in 1944, or at the beginning of this century, that two of the major concerns of Parliament and Government at the end of the 20th century would be literacy and numeracy.
"A last-minute intervention by the Prime Minister . . . saved small sixth forms from abolition",
that
"The original plans for this week's White Paper on post-16 reforms intended that sixth forms and colleges should be given equal funding",
and that that
"change would have left small sixth forms vulnerable."
The article goes on to say that the Prime Minister
"called for changes"--
not out of principle, but--
"because any perceived attack on sixth forms would lose votes in Middle England."
I have several fears about the Government's options for the future of sixth forms. It is proposed that, at the very least, local education authorities should be subject to departmental guidance on how they plan and manage post-16 education. One of the options is that, rather than local education authorities being funded by revenue support grant, they should be funded by the new learning and skills councils.
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