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Mr. Nick St. Aubyn (Guildford): Is the Secretary of State aware that the Minister for School Standards told the Select Committee yesterday that there were no plans to hold ballots involving local parents when it was proposed to turn a failing school into a city academy? Why does he not abolish ballots on grammar schools, which are about destroying diversity in schools, and introduce a system of ballots for converting failing schools into city academies, which is about creating diversity in schools? That would involve parents in the positive side of education, not the negative side.
Mr. Blunkett: If a school is going to close because it is collapsing around the pupils and parents who are engaged there, the options are dramatic change or closure. That is obvious. Grammar school ballots are about a change in admissions policy. We are not proposing to change admissions policies in the code of guidance that the House has approved for city academies. There will not be a vote on the admissions policy, which includes all the options that are currently available to schools in an area. We want to address the needs of local pupils who have been let down by the failure of the school. Drawing in parents and pupils from somewhere else would simply distribute the problem of the pupils who have been underachieving to neighbouring schools. That is why it is important to address failure where it exists, rather than simply moving the deckchairs on the Titanic as a school goes down.
The aim of fresh start and the city academies is to address a situation in which dwindling numbers, caused by parental preference, leave a school unviable and therefore likely to close in the immediate future. We have seen time and again across the country, particularly in the most deprived areas, that pupils who are left at such schools get a less satisfactory education as the months and years go by, providing them with less opportunity than is acceptable. The new system and the investment that we are announcing today will address that problem head-on.
This is about diversity. Beacon school status involves one school supporting and helping another. Specialist schools have funds specifically allocated for outreach to share their specialism with the community and other schools. Those ideas, together with excellence in cities and the education action zones, ensure that help is targeted where it is most needed and that collaboration and co-operation are at the heart of our programme. Schools have to share with each other the benefits that they gain from extra resources, the specialism and commitment of their staff and the targeted help that they can offer to the community. Rather than operating in a market that knocks one school out or lets one school succeed at the expense of others, schools must be prepared to share their expertise in a way that will enable all schools and all pupils to succeed.
We are proud of the way in which failure has been overcome. We now have more schools coming out of special measures than going in for the first time. Over the past 12 months we have had 91 more schools coming out of special measures than went in. We are turning round schools on special measures in 17 rather than 25 months. That is a dramatic change since the general election. We are doing this to ensure that children in those schools and
parents choosing or exercising a preference for those schools will know that they will get the sort of education that others take for granted.
Mr. Jonathan Shaw (Chatham and Aylesford):
Can my right hon. Friend assure me that if a school is in special measures, it will be treated equally when it makes an application for the new deal for capital improvement? A school in my constituency needs that boost for a capital programme but it is concerned that it will not be treated equally when the application is submitted.
Mr. Blunkett:
From schools desperate for the doubling of capital investment to which we have already committed ourselves, I hear the grumble, "Why should schools on special measures get preference?" I assure my hon. Friend that there will not be discrimination. We need to be able to invest in the action plan and in the recovery programme of such schools so that the new deal for schools capital and the way that it is targeted is geared entirely to ensuring that the standards in a school can be improved. I am sure that, with my ministerial colleagues, we can ensure that the new deal for schools investment programme will be part of the programme of recovery, as will the excellence in cities initiative, an extension of which I can announce.
With the money that was allocated on Tuesday, we can announce a substantial increase in the number of areas that will be entitled to the programme. The programme includes mentoring and support for individual pupils and their families, learning support units that ensure that children who are disruptive or who have a particular problem are out of the classroom but not out of education, and ensuring that our investment in gifted and talented children to tailor education to the needs of the child, whichever school he or she is in, can be enhanced and increased.
We are therefore announcing that the 450 secondary schools in the excellence in cities programme will be almost doubled to 750, which is one in five schools. It will cover 21 new local authority areas, including Tyne and Wear, Gateshead, Newcastle, North and South Tyneside and Sunderland and the boroughs that make up Teesside: Redcar, Middlesbrough, Stockton and Hartlepool. It will also include major cities that were not included in the original round: Bristol, Leicester, Stoke-on-Trent, Kingston upon Hull and Nottingham. In addition, we shall extend the existing programme of excellence to areas in London, including Barking and Dagenham, Brent and Ealing.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment (Ms Margaret Hodge):
Hear, hear.
Mr. Blunkett:
I am glad that I got a "Hear, hear" from my hon. Friend, who of course had no influence over this decision.
In the north-west, the boroughs of Wirral, St. Helens and Halton, together with Rochdale in Greater Manchester, will be included. The extension will also include a new programme for primary schools. They will now be included in the inner cities programme. About 200,000 primary pupils will initially be included in the programme in existing excellence in cities areas. It will
then be extended to the new areas from next year. I hope that with the assistance of my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the spending review as a whole, I shall be able to do more through excellence in cities in the years to come. It is a programme that even my most vehement opponents from left and right have not so far denounced, although I am obviously--
Valerie Davey (Bristol, West):
Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Blunkett:
I knew that I had spoken too soon, but not in this case, I think.
Valerie Davey:
My right hon. Friend is quite right. I want to welcome the initiative being taken in Bristol, in particular, and to ask whether he will endorse again the nature of this development, which, in sharp contrast to the previous Government's city technology proposals, instead of being divisive and establishing new schools in isolation from the rest of the school community, promotes both excellence and collaboration?
Mr. Blunkett:
Yes. That is why I emphasise the crucial nature of collaboration and partnership in all our initiatives to target disadvantage and support achievement. Excellence in cities and the city academies involve partnership and a commitment to working with the most difficult children and not only those who are already succeeding. The measure of the success of our partnership with teachers, heads and parents will be what we have done for those who were previously excluded: those who were outside the system and were least likely to succeed within it.
Mr. St. Aubyn:
The Secretary of State talks about partnership in the new schemes. Why did it take 10 years for any Labour Member to visit Emmanuel college in Gateshead, which was stretching out its hand in partnership to the local community and was shunned by the local education authority and by the 10 Labour Members in the surrounding constituencies?
Mr. Blunkett:
I seem to remember the hon. Gentleman asking me that question about 12 months ago in Education and Employment questions. The answer is exactly the one that I gave then. I am sure that he will remember it well, given that I remember the question.
Today we are addressing the backlog of neglect for all schools: not only those that were fortunate enough to get extra resources in the past but those that are now getting extra resources for the future. We will further invest in overcoming the backlog of disrepair, neglect and decay in too many of our schools.
As part of the £837 million programme for England, I am announcing a £250 million boost to the new deal for schools capital programme, ensuring that a further 3,000 schools will have investment in overcoming inadequacies such as leaking roofs, windows that let in the cold and wet, temporary classrooms--there are still 10,000 of those--and the neglect of the basic fabric that has led to the deterioration of buildings over the past two decades.
We have already doubled the capital investment in education. The extra money will enable us to do far more in the coming two years, which will be welcomed in
constituencies throughout the country. We will shortly announce how it is to be distributed. In the previous round of new deal for schools, we had bids that exceeded the resources available fivefold, so we will not reopen the bidding process, but we will work with schools and education authorities to tackle the priority needs that it was not possible to meet under the previous round. I hope that all concerned will welcome that.
We will also be able to tackle what might be described as the school and classroom of the future and to experiment with how the school day, the school year and the nature of teaching will change in years to come. I stress that we want to work in partnership with both the profession and education authorities in achieving change. We want to ensure that experiments are evaluated and that people are free to take new steps in finding out what works best.
The experiment in Telford city technology college--with the learning day instead of the traditional school day, the use of technology and the provision of teachers as learning managers and mentors--has been extremely successful. We want to learn from such programmes in looking to the future for a secondary school system that matches the aspirations that we all share. It is, therefore, crucial to ensure that the worlds of school and work are developed in partnership together. That is why I wish to stress this afternoon the importance of our investment in skills and in employment. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Employment, Welfare to Work and Equal Opportunities and the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment, my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Ms Hodge) will spell out with me over the next few weeks the way in which the additional resources for employment will be targeted at extending our programmes, and intensifying the new deal programme and the work with young people at an early stage. That will include directed help to particular areas of the country where there are low levels of employment and high levels of unemployment, and will include employment zones, which we announced two weeks ago.
In the months ahead, we shall talk about the development of specific help for those moving from long-term unemployment back into work, including lone parents, and how we can assist that progress further. We shall also examine how we can extend the success of the new deal for the under-25s to the long-term unemployed over the age of 25, including from this April the extension of the pilot programmes for getting the over-50s back to work. The older one gets, the more important the work with the over-50s seems.
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