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Mrs. May: The Secretary of State has referred to the fact that the 100 per cent. grant will now be given to schools in the excellence in cities areas. Will he confirm that schools will be able to receive 100 per cent. of the grant only if the local authority puts in its full bid for standards fund money?
Mr. Blunkett: An authority will have the money available to put in the initial amount only if it actually applies for the money in the first place. That is certainly true. The standards fund, to which the hon. Lady referred, is additional ring-fenced money over and above the revenue support grant and has been applied directly to the policies that she has dismissed: namely, those targeted political policies known as the literacy and the numeracy strategies. Far from undermining the life chances of children, those strategies are beginning to transform them.
Why did we set about the ring-fenced, earmarked and targeted funding that the hon. Lady mentioned? Why have we taken the actions that we have? It was because, when we took office, four out of 10 children could not read, write or add up properly at the age of 11. The hon. Lady can judge whether that is a legacy to be proud of.
Helen Jones (Warrington, North):
Is my right hon. Friend surprised, as I am, that the speech of the hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) made no mention of the latest Ofsted report? In it, the chief inspector of schools refers to rising standards, particularly at key stage 2, and says:
Mr. Blunkett:
Because the hon. Lady never attempted once to talk about what is happening in the classroom to improve the life chances or achievement of children. In fact, I am not sure how many times she mentioned children other than to suggest that, somehow, what was needed was the extra money that the Conservative Government had not allocated to them. It was the height of jiggery-pokery, to use a slightly different term.
Mr. Blunkett:
That has got people going. Which of the pokery and jiggery shall I give way to first? How about the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles)?
Mr. Eric Pickles (Brentwood and Ongar):
When the right hon. Gentleman examined the Ofsted reports, did he
Mr. Blunkett:
I am very happy to consider the school in question--the Anglo-European school. We shall ensure that we make access available to it and that we examine its resources. However, we have given absolute guarantees to the schools that the hon. Member for Maidenhead mentioned and which receive additional funding because they are grant maintained, rather than because of their pupil numbers or particular circumstances. We have given absolute guarantees of continued funding in real terms and we shall continue to ensure that those schools are supported.
I believe the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) was among those who wished to intervene earlier.
Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham):
Does the Secretary of State understand how offensive it can seem to someone teaching in a primary school on the Isles of Scilly or in a primary school in Wokingham that has had its funding cut when he laughs at the name of the Isles of Scilly, which has real educational problems, and when he authorises large sums of expenditure on glossy brochures to publish his own speeches and other words from the Department for Education and Employment? Is not that the wrong priority? Will he now say sorry, and will he say that more money will be made available to primary schools in need?
Mr. Blunkett:
I did not, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, laugh at the education system in the Isles of Scilly. Certainly I laughed at the attempt by the hon. Member for Maidenhead to draw conclusions for England as a whole from the situation in the Isles of Scilly, where the Government are protecting, and will continue to protect through our small schools fund, schools that would otherwise have been threatened by the actions and policies of the previous Government.
Under that Government, there was no small schools fund and no attempt to ensure that schools could stay open by linking technology, by co-operative working and by pulling schools together instead of making them compete with each other. There is now a fund specifically to provide small primary schools with administrative support so that head teachers are free to do their job. All that is entirely new and did not exist under the previous Government.
I shall not apologise for putting out the speech on the future of secondary education from the north of England conference, because secondary education had been grossly neglected by the previous Government, standards had not been maintained and almost a third of children in the first year of secondary schools found themselves going backwards. We face a major issue in tackling the under-achievement in our secondary sector: to provide diversity, to increase specialism and to ensure that we have a truly comprehensive system.
Nor do I apologise for putting out a major statement on the future of higher education--an issue that the previous Government ducked time and time again. The hon. Lady
had the audacity to say that we were cutting funding per pupil. Between 1989 and 1997, there was a cut of £2,500 per university student, and we have reversed 36 per cent. of that. We have cut the efficiency gains to 1 per cent., as recommended by Dearing. We have put in £1.1 billion--an increase of 11 per cent. in real terms--over the three years of the spending review, and we have lifted the cap on numbers.
Mrs. May:
As the Secretary of State has specifically referred to Dearing and the 1 per cent. efficiency gains, will he comment on the remarks of the Association of University Teachers--that current expenditure plans not only do not provide for tuition fee income to be additional income but go well beyond Dearing's call for 1 per cent. efficiency gains for two years, amounting to a
Over and above the revenue support grant increase of 5.4 per cent. for the coming year, we have funded the teachers' pay award. The better teachers do, the better we shall pay them, and we shall encourage their professional development and provide performance-related promotion. That is all ring-fenced money on top of the amount available in the revenue support grant, and responds entirely to schools that ask us to ensure that when there are substantial changes of that sort, they get the money directly rather than through the standard spending assessment.
Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham):
In order that Conservative Members, at least, may prick up our ears in readiness, will the right hon. Gentleman be good enough to tell the House at what point in his speech he intends to refer to, and to apologise for, the massive damage that he inflicted on children's education during his tenure as leader of Sheffield city council?
Mr. Blunkett:
That beggars belief. Let me put the facts on the record. I accept responsibility in respect of the city of Sheffield for the years 1980 to 1987. In 1985, a report by Her Majesty's inspectorate said that Sheffield's was one of the three best education authorities in the country. That was matched by an Audit Commission report that said that Sheffield's public services were "a shining example".
I stand on my record on education and the comparability of Sheffield with other cities. If I had my time again, I would have introduced 15 years ago some of the measures that the Government are introducing now. The children of Sheffield would have had a greater chance
of receiving a better education. However, at that time, we faced a Conservative Government who slashed public expenditure at every opportunity, denigrated public service, undermined the education system and encouraged people to go private. Anyone who looks back to those years should feel shamed by the former Government's actions.
The Conservative Government allowed our schools--public buildings--to deteriorate to the extent that we have had to double expenditure just to return some of them to the state in which they provide an acceptable environment where teachers can teach and pupils can be taught. In two years' time, 11,000 schools will have benefited from the new deal for schools--a programme introduced, not with match funding, but with direct grant; not with credit approvals and borrowing, but with direct funding--to ensure that schools obtain the sort of investment that they never got under the previous Government. That is what we have been doing at every stage, through the standards fund work with head teachers and the new leadership college to bring about a transformation of management; through helping small schools; and through the improvement grants made under the standards fund.
The Opposition motion speaks of "setting schools free"; I am not sure what the Conservative notion of a free school is. It talks of parental choice, but so-called free schools are the ones that choose the child--that is what happened under the Conservative Government. The motion talks about "trusting the professionals", but the Conservatives have opposed the improvement of professional standards through professional development matched by increased pay--extra resources that will be in the pay packets of hundreds of thousands of teachers in the years to come. Instead of attacking the changes that the Labour Government have made, Conservative Members should take a leaf out of the shadow Chancellor's book and re-examine their policies to find ways of mirroring, matching and challenging us on the basis of improving standards.
We know that our schools need more resources and that greater investment is desirable; with our economic policies and our growth record, it will be possible for the Labour Government to achieve those goals. We also know that in the last three years of the Conservative Government, not only did the proportion of gross domestic product invested in education start to fall, but there were real terms cuts in spending on primary education of £80 per pupil, pupil:teacher ratios worsened, and class sizes rocketed. In 1997, we inherited a budget profile that, had we implemented it, would have resulted in 15,000 teachers losing their jobs; instead, we immediately put in £835 million. We had promised to stabilise and freeze spending, but we did not; instead, we put in more money and saved schools from disaster. Then we started the process of investment.
"This is a very significant and promising development, which is directly linked to the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies".
Why does my right hon. Friend think that there was no mention of that in the hon. Lady's speech?
"plan for cuts of this level for the remainder of the current spending plans"?
Mr. Blunkett:
I do not accept that for a moment. We announced that we would retain the 1 per cent. cuts that we introduced rather than the enormous 4 per cent. real terms cuts that were taking place under the previous Government, and we have said that we will do so throughout the remainder of this spending review. We have put in an extra £295 million for 2001, bringing the total increase, as I said, to 11 per cent. in real terms. We have every intention in the spending review of ensuring that we maintain a world-class university system that is open, equal and equitable for all students, not just those who can afford it.
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