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5.57 pm
Mrs. Anne Campbell (Cambridge): I am pleased to be called to speak in this debate, as education is the most important issue in my constituency. I shall begin by saying how delighted everyone in my area was when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State overturned the plan of the Tory county council to close Coleridge community college. That very important secondary school has high standards of educational achievement. It is the only city secondary school to win a mark of approval as most improved school. Its closure would have left one of the most deprived parts of my constituency without a school and without a thriving community centre.
Last Friday, I visited St. Philip's community primary school in Cambridge. I was delighted at the progress that had been made since my visit last year. The 1997 Ofsted report said that St. Philip's was a successful and improving school working in a challenging area of high social need. It is important to understand that, as many people assume that any school in Cambridge is very middle class and in a leafy suburb. There are many schools in my constituency of which that is not true, and it is certainly not true of St. Philip's. Of its pupils, 43 per cent. are entitled to free school meals, 10 per cent. do not have English as their first language, and 21 per cent. are from ethnic minority backgrounds and speak two languages.
On both my visits to the school I was greeted by polite, well-behaved children determined to be helpful. They displayed enthusiasm for, and pride in, their school. The head teacher, Jill Pauling, showed me the building programme made possible by the additional money to reduce infant class sizes. The percentage of infant class children in Cambridge being taught in classes of 30 or more has fallen from 37 per cent. when this Government came into office to 7 per cent. now. That is thanks to the money made available by the Government.
I saw small groups of under-achievers being given tuition, with money from the standards fund, to bring them up to a higher standard. Children told me that they enjoyed the literacy strategy and the numeracy strategy. I was amazed that they understood those words, but they used them with confidence. One boy told me about his achievement levels in the different subject areas.
I also saw an adult literacy class going on in daytime school hours. One young mum, who had two children at the school, told me how she was taking GCSE English and enjoying it as she had never enjoyed learning when she was at school. These are remarkable achievements in a school in a deprived part of the city that does not have the advantage of many well-off, better-educated parents. I take this opportunity publicly to congratulate the head teacher on the excellence that she has created.
Most of the unhappiness in Cambridge centres on the funding formula. Neighbouring local education authorities in Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire have much more generous allocations than Cambridgeshire. For primary schools, the standard spending assessment per pupil for the year 2000-01 is £77 more in Bedfordshire, £128 more in Essex and £161 more in Hertfordshire. For secondary school pupils, the corresponding differences are £117, £182 and £206. It is important to place those figures on the record, because the Liberal Democrats in my constituency are very fond of sending out newsletters and leaflets which exaggerate those figures grossly. They are quite large, but the figures issued by the Liberal Democrats bear no relation to reality.
If these differences are reflected in school budgets, a secondary school with 1,000 pupils in Hertfordshire will have £200,000 a year more to spend than a similar school in Cambridgeshire. That will mean six or seven more teachers and more money for books and equipment. Those differences are very hard to explain to parents.
I am interested in the barrage of complaints from Tory Members. They have the cheek to complain about a funding formula which they put in place and which they totally failed to reform in the following seven years of their term of office. Every year since I was elected in 1992, I have been to see the Minister responsible for local government about the reform of the area cost adjustment. I started with the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) in 1992, through to the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) in 1996. Every year I was told that it was being reviewed, but those reviews never led to reform.
Mr. Graham Brady (Altrincham and Sale, West): Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Campbell: I am sorry, but I have limited time and, tempted as I am, I am not prepared to give way.
Now that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Local Government and the Regions is in charge of the process, I am confident, from my many conversations with her on the subject, that the review will lead to proposals that can be agreed. May I stress to my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench that it is essential that when the review is completed, they should make it clear that it must be acted on? We simply cannot afford to dash expectations which were dashed so many times by the previous Government.
In the past few months, I have asked many parliamentary questions to determine Cambridgeshire's position in the funding league. I have discovered that
Cambridgeshire schools have seen increases in the SSA per pupil in real terms since the Government came to power. According to a parliamentary question answered on 20 December 1999 by my right hon. Friend the Minister for School Standards, the SSA per pupil in Cambridgeshire was £2,578 in 1992-93. Throughout the remaining Tory years, it plunged year on year to a low of £2,464--£114 lower than at the beginning of the Tory Government. That was the figure that this Government inherited in 1997-98. Since then, there has been a steady increase, and the figure will be £2,591 per pupil. That is higher than it ever was in the Tory years.Yet Tory Members of Parliament and county councillors continue to criticise, and to blame the Government for their own ineptitude. What has changed is the amount of cash by which Cambridgeshire county council tops up the SSA for education. The hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) said that Cambridgeshire spends more than its SSA. Yes, it does--it is spending around £4.8 million more than its SSA this year. However, in 1995-96, when Cambridgeshire was controlled by a Labour-Liberal Democrat administration, and we had a Tory Government, the top-up was £15 million--a great deal more. We have lost £10 million in that period.
This is the first year that the Tory county council has passed on the full increase in education SSA to the education budget, so schools in Cambridgeshire should see their financial situation eased somewhat in the coming year.
We have heard a great deal in the past few months about how the Tories intend to reduce the share of national income taken in tax. We have heard nothing from them about how they intend to continue increasing education spending in line with our increases. Given that the previous shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), described our spending plans as reckless, mad and a mistake, do we take it that the current shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Portillo), shares that view? If the Tories were ever returned to power, would we see a steep drop in the real-terms funding of schools such as we saw in 1992 to 1997, which resulted in a 4.5 per cent. drop in Cambridgeshire? Parents need to know the answers to those questions, which are vital to our children's future.
Finally, no one so far has mentioned the vital issue of further education. Last Friday, I visited the Cambridge regional college, a medium-to-large further education collection in my constituency, which achieves very high standards. Like the two sixth-form colleges in Cambridge, the college has a number of Oxbridge entries each year, but it also provides a wide range of vocational as well as academic courses. The college principal, Ann Limb, told me how much they were looking forward to the vocational A-levels. She warmly welcomes the reforms to further education and training that have been introduced by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.
There is a great deal to celebrate; I know that there is also a great deal to be done. I think that we have made a huge amount of progress, and I look forward to seeing more improvements in future.
6.6 pm
Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon): The epic journey of hon. Member for Cambridge (Mrs. Campbell) through the area cost adjustment suffered a somewhat
truncated conclusion. I seem to recall the Labour party in opposition saying that it would solve it in its first year of office, then in its second year, and now it has been frozen to the whole of the Government's term. I hope that the hon. Lady will continue to address her concerns, this time to a place where there is the ability to answer them, although of course Ministers no longer receive delegations on any local government matter. They are hiding behind the iceberg. As I have said, the area cost adjustment is like the north-west passage--at the end of the day, it does not exist. I shall look forward to seeing how the Government try to get out of it.I may be unique in this debate, as I do not intend to speak about finance. I hope that the House does not believe that all education problems boil down to finance. It is true that some problems can be made easier if we throw money at them. However, money is irrelevant to the problem in my constituency. I refer to the ballot that is taking place on the future of the two secondary schools. I insist that it is about the two secondary schools in my constituency, not just about the grammar school.
I do not want to talk about the substance of the issue, which must be decided by the people who are entitled to vote in Ripon--far too few of them, as a matter of fact--but I do want to talk about the mechanics. If the Government had wanted to invite parents to decide on the future of grammar schools, they should have required every local education authority in which selective schools exist to draw up a plan of reorganisation. They should then have submitted that plan of reorganisation to a ballot of parents so that they could choose between clear alternatives. The Government have succeeded, remarkably, in making everyone feel cheated. Those who wish to save the grammar school believe that the ballot is rigged against them. Those who wish to get rid of the grammar school also believe that the ballot is rigged against them. It is not hard to see why.
To cap it all, the issue is very divisive in a small town. I realise that there may be ballots to follow in whole education authority areas, in places such as Kent, Surrey or Buckinghamshire. But in Ripon, which is a small town of 15,000 people, and its immediate hinterland, a ballot that is open for five weeks is divisive to the point where it is almost impossible to speak of it in conversation without being marched to the frontier and expelled. Unfortunately, one would be expelled into the constituency of the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), a fate that most people wish to avoid at almost any cost.
The mechanics of the matter make it obscure. The choice is not clear. When the ballot was introduced, people assumed that the question would be whether the grammar school, which is on one side of Clotherholme road, and Ripon college, which is on the other, would become a single comprehensive. That, however, is not what the debate is about. North Yorkshire county council, to whose impartiality and fairness I pay tribute, issued a question and answer paper to parents. It asked whether, if the vote was yes--that is, to end selection at the grammar school--that would result in a single comprehensive, and it answered its own question by saying, "Not necessarily."
The council also said that the purpose of the ballot was to alter admission arrangements at the grammar school. Would that mean that parents who wanted their children
to go to the reorganised grammar school would be able to do so? The council again said, "Not necessarily." It is small wonder that people feel that they are being asked to choose between the known and the unknown. There is no clear choice.I suppose that I should be pleased about that because, as I have made clear in the constituency, I believe that people should vote against reorganisation. I should be happier, however, if I felt that the choice was clear and the electorate more representative. There are anomalies in the ballot. The choice is limited to 15 feeder schools--those that sent five people to the grammar school over the previous three years. Which schools fall into or out of that category is almost accidental. Had the ballot been held earlier, parents at Borobridge primary school, from which a tiny number of pupils go to the grammar school, would have been included, although most parents send their children to Borobridge high school, an extremely good comprehensive whose strong sixth form I helped to obtain when the school was in my constituency. Most of those parents have no interest, other than neighbourly feeling, in what happens in Ripon, but they would have been enfranchised.
A further anomaly is that two of the schools in Ripon have infant schools that are constitutionally separate from the junior schools to which they belong. In practice, the distinction is tiny, but parents with children at Holy Trinity and Moorside infant schools do not have a vote. If their children were at the infant schools attached to the Cathedral school, they would have a vote. Once again, the electorate is nominated under entirely perverse arrangements. Three independent schools are able to vote. Under the system chosen by the Government, it is logical that they should be able to vote, because they meet the criteria. However, at least some of the parents will have not the faintest interest in education in Ripon.
The worst thing of all is that anyone with a child in the final year of a feeder primary school can vote on the future of the two secondary schools. However, anyone with a child in the first year of either of the secondary schools--a child with up to seven years of education ahead--is not entitled to vote. I want parents of children at both secondary schools to have a vote. I do not want to confine it to those at the grammar school; that would be unfair. All parents should have the opportunity.
If the vote is for change, it is definitive. However, if the vote goes against change, there could be another in five years' time. I am not sure that head teachers should have to survive the same uncertainty as politicians, looking constantly towards the possibility of challenge. If the vote is for change, we will all work to make the best we can of it. We shall certainly try to ensure that the technology college status achieved by Ripon college, with which everyone is delighted--I am grateful to the Minister for School Standards, who was highly supportive and who understands the importance of that status to Ripon--will carry over to the new school. However, if the no vote wins, we will focus on the college's progress so that it can become a school proud of offering a distinctive and first-rate education. The colossal progress that it has maintained under its head teacher, Paul Lowery, should be continued.
Matters remain to be checked. In the selection system, the appeals procedure in North Yorkshire is not impeccable, and it should be revised. We should revise constantly to ensure that the constellation of schools in the
area offers the best possible education. We are focusing increasingly on what goes on inside schools and on the quality of education internally generated rather than externally imposed by a Government apparently determined to Bonapartise education with Napoleonic prescriptions. The Government must decide whether they truly believe in internal dynamism arising from the quality of the head teacher and staff, which will generate an ability to improve performance and competitiveness in a school.There is a choice to be made, but the Government are trying to take both options, leaving schools confused. I hope that the issue will be resolved in Ripon, and that lessons will be drawn elsewhere. I hope that we may have an opportunity to develop a partnership of schools of equal but different excellence. The Government must reflect on the sheer perversity of the arrangements in place. They must see why so many parents think that the system is perverse in its mechanics but definitive in its outcome. If the wrong choice is made this time, there is no going back. If a different choice is made, uncertainty may continue ad infinitum, and that would be wrong.
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