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Mrs. May: The hon. Gentleman has made a couple of references to what he perceives as the failure of the Conservative party's education policies. Can he tell us which policies the Liberal party rejects: the introduction of the national curriculum, the introduction of the Office for Standards in Education or the introduction of testing?
Mr. Willis: I shall answer the hon. Lady directly. As a head, I supported the introduction of the national curriculum until it arrived at the school--lorry load after lorry load of it. Indeed, it arrived on the same lorry that the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks is now using. My staff and I were constantly fed up with two-stage pay awards every year and the local authority--of which I was an elected member--having to spend all its time reducing its education budgets every year.
If the hon. Lady is talking about the abolition of school organisation committees and the so-called independent adjudicators and returning admission and appeals to democratically elected local authorities, I shall stand by and support her. However, I suspect that she does not seek that. If she wants to remove from schools the necessity to produce an absurd number of individual plans on subjects ranging from literacy to asset management, my party and I shall support her. [Interruption.] From a sedentary position, Ministers ask whether we want to get rid of asset management plans. The last thing that most small rural primary schools in North Yorkshire want is to look after asset management--they want somebody to do it for them. A two-class primary school has a lot on in looking after the curriculum and standards, so the amount of planning that goes on is an issue.
If the hon. Lady wants to put an end to the torrent of centrally driven initiatives, proposals and targets, we shall stand with her. We want them to be reduced. If she wants to reduce the amount of paper that comes out of the Department for Education and Employment by the equivalent of a rain forest a year, again we shall stand with her. Papers regularly come through the doors of school governors and one of their great cries during the recent Education and Employment Committee inquiry was for an end to that. If the hon. Lady wants to campaign with the Liberal Democrats for the removal of tuition fees from our students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, again we shall stand with her. But no: the revolution that the Tories have in mind is a free-for-all that could produce 23,525 separate admission authorities, 23,525 separate appeals bodies and 23,525 schools that could spend more time dealing with legal disputes than with the curriculum.
The Tory party wants to support heads. It wants to support teachers, so that they can raise standards. However, it wants to give parents the power to call ballots
to sack head teachers, and then, presumably, to fund the expensive legal battles that will follow from school budgets. It says that parents should call for more inspections by the Office of Standards in Education when standard assessment test results dip. In last year's Ofsted report, 8 per cent. of schools were said to have serious weaknesses, and the average cost of an inspection is £13,000. If every one of those schools asked for an extra inspection, another £25 million would be needed. Is that how parents want their resources to be spent? Is that the "common-sense approach" to the reduction of bureaucracy?The Tories also want to establish "free schools". The idea has been copied from the charter school movement in the United States, but has been taken one step further, because a Conservative Government would fund the buildings as well as revenue costs. It is a doubtful message: if schools are freed from all state or local control, they will deliver a better education system for our children. There is no evidence whatever to back up that proposition, certainly not in the United States, where we have seen a ragbag of institutions, the so-called best controlled by private-sector companies.
Mrs. May: Free schools do not owe their origin to the charter school movement in the United States, and we do indeed have examples of the way in which schools can improve education when they are given their freedom. We see that in the grant-maintained schools, which use money previously spent by local authorities on bureaucracy to increase the number of teachers, and to do various other things that greatly improve the quality of education.
Mr. Willis: I am pleased that the hon. Lady has dissociated herself from some of her Back Benchers, who claimed that they had brought back this solution for Tory thinking from America, and were proud of having done so. I talked to one who extolled the virtues of the marvellous so-called free schools, controlled by private companies such as Edison and Advantage. With those providers, schools must take the curriculum they are given, the methodology they are given and the materials they are given. Is that really what we want for parents and teachers in the future?
Let me ask the hon. Lady this. What happens to the special-needs child in the free school movement? What happens to the advantages that we have secured over the past 10 years in terms of inclusive education? How will such children fit into a free school that has its own admissions policy? Can it refuse a child with severe learning difficulties, or educational and behavioural difficulties? A child with cerebral palsy or sensory impairment will have no right of access to free schools.
What about the disruptive child? Will another free school be obliged to take him? Will the only provision be made in the "headway centres"--or pupil referral units, which is what they actually are? Given that those are grossly underfunded at present, what will happen when students are excluded from schools, perhaps permanently? I can tell the hon. Lady that in parts of London, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham there could be more students in her headway centres than in mainstream schools, if heads were allowed simply to turf them out. However, parents, governors and teachers should not worry: the likelihood of a Conservative Government being elected with such nonsensical policies is pretty remote.
That is not to say that many of the hon. Lady's criticisms of the Government are not justified. The Liberal Democrats share her concerns about the smoke and mirrors over finance. I, too, visit schools where I am asked, "Where is the £19 billion that is being spent on education? Where do I see it in my budget?" I worked in a local authority that passported every penny of the £12.9 million for education last year and increased council tax by 9.6 per cent., but still cut school budgets by nearly 1.5 per cent.
We are concerned about the increasing centralisation of the curriculum and teaching methodology. Of course the literacy hour initiative was needed in many of our schools, but it certainly was not needed in every school. Teachers wanted the flexibility that would enable them to do things as they wanted to do them, in accordance with the needs of children.
We are concerned, too, about the creeping privatisation of the education system--the Government's belief that the private sector can always do things better. The events at Rams episcopal school in Hackney demonstrated that there are no sure-fire solutions. It was interesting to note that, after Islington council had been forced to hand over the running of its local education authority to Cambridge Education Associates Ltd, the first thing that it did was to recruit a chief education officer from Richmond upon Thames to lead its team--an example of the fact that, in the public sector, we still have some fine officers and leaders.
In the time that is left--I understand that we are on a tight schedule--I want to highlight our concerns about the most important issue facing the school system: the promotion of a highly qualified, well-motivated and well-paid teaching profession. It will not be the Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Maidenhead or I who will improve standards in schools, but our teachers and heads. The Liberal Democrats continue to have concerns about the Government's proposals on performance-related pay. We continue to believe that they are divisive, fail to address the key issues that face the profession and will ultimately fail both to motivate and to retain staff. Above all, they will do precious little to persuade the best potential teachers to join the profession.
My main criticism is not about the principle of PRP. Clearly, it works in other sectors, but it will not achieve the desired outcomes for the profession, schools or the Government. Where is the evidence that it is possible to accredit an individual child's performance to an individual teacher, other than in the most simplistic way? No evidence was presented in the Green Paper. None has been presented since.
Teaching is a team activity. Who is to say that the influence of a sports teacher or music department on a child's motivation is more or less important than what the child sees in classrooms elsewhere? How do we assess the effects of early-years experience; access to private tuition; the number of children in a class with special needs; children with English as a second language; the size of the teaching group; and the work of other members of staff? The list is endless.
The Government have obviously been listening to some of the arguments--the dropping of reference to
- "progress towards national levels of achievement"
The rest of the proposals are fraught with inconsistencies. If PRP is there to motivate staff and to raise standards, why is it voluntary? Why is not applied to all colleagues already at point 9 on the scale?
Those teachers already working well are being told that they must work harder to receive and to retain a threshold payment, but what of the others? Are those who do not put themselves forward to be judged as "ineffective" teachers and perhaps lazy? Will parents be informed of their status? Will women, who form the bulk of teachers, particularly at primary level, be discriminated against because they do not want to take on the increased burdens of additional activity?
Of course there is merit in rewarding our best teachers, but surely the challenge is to encourage teachers to work better, not simply harder, for more pay. Access to quality professional development as a statutory right would make a huge statement about valuing our teachers, yet the Government have ignored that option. Statutory access to non-contact time to prepare materials and to mark work would do much to raise the quality of teaching and morale, particularly in primary schools.
A fundamental principle of any PRP scheme is additionality. I was pleased when, on Thursday last, the Secretary of State appeared to commit the Government to continuing ring-fencing of resources to meet the costs of PRP after the initial two years. May I press the Government on that commitment? Will the Minister make it clear that, after the initial two years, the Government will continue to guarantee threshold payments and to ring-fence resources directly from the DFEE? Can she say how that mechanism will work?
Will future performance-related payments in the upper range or on the management scale be ring-fenced with additional money? Without such a guarantee, the scheme is bound to fail. If the Government intend to ask schools to incorporate any PRP payments from initial budgets after two years, we shall be back to the situation that I faced as a head teacher, when I had the option to give promotion points and excellence points, but no money to do so.
Will the Minister also clarify the position of those who become advanced skills or fast track teachers? As I understand the guidance, they will have to give up many of their present conditions of service, including the limit of 1,268 hours of directed time. If so directed, they will have to be available to undertake breakfast clubs or after-school clubs. If that is the case, there will be a large price to pay for going through the threshold.
There is an absurd timetable for the implementation of the scheme, with insufficient time to train heads and allow them to carry out assessments appropriately for September 2000. The reduction in the number of criteria from 16 to eight may superficially appear to simplify matters, but it has resulted in a massive expansion of guidance notes for heads, opening the floodgates for a tidal wave of bureaucracy. Few teachers will have the documentation available. That may well create huge tensions between them and the head.
I make an earnest plea to the Secretary of State to think again about the timetable. If a performance-related pay scheme is to be introduced, all the questions that are being asked must be properly answered and there must be a proper time scale--otherwise, it will fail.
Last year, the Government proudly announced that their teacher recruitment targets were being met. One of the fundamental issues for the PRP scheme and the Green Paper was to address the fact that so few quality people were choosing to come into teaching. The Secretary of State announced in December that maths teacher training was up by 16 per cent., but the Government made little noise about the fact that they had missed their recruitment target by 23 per cent. They made even less noise about the fact that most children at key stage 3 are not taught by a maths specialist. There are few press releases about the fact that in 1999 only history and PE reached their recruitment targets. This month, applications for maths teaching were 19 per cent. below last year's figure. Science and English are also down by 19 per cent. When I visited Imperial college recently, none of the third year undergraduates whom I talked to wanted to come into teaching, because they could get a starting salary at least £10,000 better elsewhere. We have to address the fact that we are in a competitive marketplace for teachers. If we want to ensure that we recruit the best, it is not good enough just to give teachers £2,000 extra at point 9 on the salary scale--we have to raise the starting salary.
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