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Mr. Willis: The hon. Gentleman accused the Minister of tabling a banal amendment to our motion, and that was a banal question. No right-thinking individual believes that teachers should not be protected from violent students. Unlike him and his privileged friends, I spent my whole life in state education, not in the leafy lanes of Buckingham but working in downtown schools in Leeds and Middlesbrough with very difficult and challenging youngsters, and in 34 years I never came across a student wielding a knife--not once.
That is not to say that there are no students who wield knives, but let me tell the hon. Gentleman, before he goes apoplectic again, that the vast majority of Britain's schools are safe places in which to work. The vast majority of teachers do not encounter the horrors that he and his colleagues peddle stories about around the country and portray as the norm, frightening kids and parents into choosing private education.
Mr. Hope: The hon. Gentleman has hit on an important point about the deliberate attempt by the Conservatives to raise fears. They create unnecessary worry and, more importantly, undermine the real efforts of teachers to deal with and help challenging and difficult pupils. The scaremongering undermines our efforts to give teachers the support and help that they need to do a good job.
Mr. Willis: That is right. The Conservatives are using scare tactics. They have absolutely no other policy. Yes, violent and disruptive pupils must be removed from the classroom, and even the Minister would accept that the ludicrous targets for cutting exclusions must be abandoned by the Department for Education and Employment, but unless we address behaviour problems in a comprehensive and imaginative way, all we will succeed in doing is to create an even greater problem for society further down the road.
When one considers the social exclusion unit's report, "Bridging the Gap" and sees how many of those 170,000 youngsters leave school and spend the next two years out of work, with no hope and moving into crime, one realises that this is a real issue that must be grasped. I would have hoped that we would have a consensus across the House on how to tackle challenging behaviour. Instead, the opportunity has been used to score cheap political points.
It is not fashionable to link social disadvantage with educational underachievement. There is always evidence to demonstrate that some outstanding individuals and institutions buck the trend. However, there remains a strong negative correlation between social disadvantage and educational achievement, just as there is a strong positive correlation between educational achievement and economic and social upward mobility. Given those facts, I do not see why it should surprise the Chancellor of the Exchequer that while a mere 7 per cent. of our children attend private schools, they make up 35 per cent. of the straight-A students and take up some 50 per cent. of Oxbridge places. Inequities are as deep-rooted in our culture as they are in our Government, in the civil service and in our major universities. Inequity will be found anywhere where wealth is still able to purchase social advantage.
The answer from the Liberal Democrats is not the politics of envy. It is not a re-run of a former class war, but the real politics of fighting the seeds of injustice that create barriers for so many of our young people. The Chancellor's attack on Oxbridge was misguided. His attack should have been on his own Government for introducing tuition fees, for ending grants for students and for pricing poor students out of the marketplace, because that is what has happened, according to the figures from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service and the Mosaics survey.
The Chancellor's attack should have been on the Prime Minister for encouraging the Russell group and the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals to believe that a Labour Government would allow them to charge differential tuition fees in a USA-style revamping of higher education finance. I listened carefully to the Minister's speech today, but the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 would allow universities to charge differential fees. I accept that the Government would then take grant from the universities in equal amounts, but nothing in the legislation would stop differential charging.
The Chancellor's attack should have been on his own Government for continuing systematically to reduce the unit funding level for higher education students from £4,980 in 1997 to £4,750 this year. The hon. Member for Buckingham did not answer the Minister's intervention about the 35 per cent. decrease since 1989, but in that year the unit funding per student in higher education was £7,385. It was reduced by 35 per cent. and fell to an unacceptable level by the time this Government took over. We do need a systematic overhaul of an outdated and biased admission system, but the real challenge is ensuring that a greater number of our young people aspire to go to Oxbridge and have the qualifications they need to do so. That means tackling the inherent injustices in our state education system.
I saw as one of my most important challenges as a head as being to help young people from underprivileged backgrounds fight social injustice through their education. To deny that our education system has that prime purpose
is to deny the need for universal education at all and to return to the pre-1870 Britain, where the working classes were educated simply according to economic need. We hear fine words from the Government about education for the many, not the few, but so much of their approach has been disjointed and lacked research, co-ordination and vision, as well as resources.The social exclusion unit was set up in 1997 after the Prime Minister's call for a
- Britain in which no one is excluded from opportunity and the chance to develop their potential.
- our national purpose to tackle social division and inequality.
- Education cannot compensate for society.
5.56 pm
Mr. Andrew Rowe (Faversham and Mid-Kent): Several slogans could be brought into this debate. I would like to see, for example, parents involved; residents trusted; professionals valued; and young people seriously consulted. That little menu could make an enormous contribution to achieving a society that we could really value.
We could begin by involving parents. One of the saddest features of underperforming schools is that when heads, governors and staff turn out for an open night, nobody comes. That is a real tragedy and it happens again and again. Even when certificates are handed out, few parents take the trouble to turn up in far too many of our schools. That is partly a function of the hours that those parents work, and it may be that certificate-awarding ceremonies and parents' evenings should be staggered, so that people who work late at night in underpaid jobs can attend. We may need to be more imaginative. However, in many schools our young professional teachers have an uphill struggle against parental indifference, which is broken only when the parents believe that their child has been discriminated against and, in many cases, make a thoroughly inappropriate response.
A young woman I know of was in her first job and keen as mustard. She worked in an inner-London school and found that, in a class of 35, 16 languages were spoken and one child was so disturbed that he sat at the back nodding his head until he made himself sick. What happens to the other 34 children while the unaccompanied teacher tries to clear up the mess? After two terms in the
school, that young woman, in her first year of teaching, was offered the deputy headship because none of the other staff had stayed. That is the reality of some areas of our education system. We must do much more to support teachers. Instead, they are denigrated and verbally assaulted for being incompetent or inefficient. There are inefficient teachers, and they should be eased out of the system, but the majority struggle against tremendous odds.Governments are full of good intentions, but as we all know, good intentions lead straight to hell. All education Ministers want to change things, so they issue a raft of circulars on taking office. By the time the last school in the country has implemented those changes, the first school to do so is probably three education Ministers' changes down the track. It is impossible for schools to make sense of what they are being asked to do, if they are asked far too often to change what they do.
I believe that we make far too little use of volunteers to support professionals. I am a trustee of the charity Community Service Volunteers, which for many years has been trying to get employers interested in sending employees into schools at lunchtime. People who do that enrich their own lives and improve their performance at work, but also enrich enormously the lives of the pupils whom they help.
I think that the country should have a national youth service. Young people should be able to volunteer for a proper length of time so that they can find themselves. The Nuffield study and other studies have found considerable evidence that young people who volunteer change their attitudes to minorities and to each other.
There is a danger that the debate belongs in the land of the Wizard of Oz. Hon. Members have talked about getting to university and the surge of people going into higher education. I am delighted that that is happening, but we must ensure that higher education is as it should be. I am deeply worried by the changes that have taken place in some parts of higher education in recent years. It is now common for senior academics to be promoted on the basis of the money that they have attracted through their research, rather than on the basis of their teaching.
Teaching is becoming very much disregarded, at least in many of our more successful universities. Most students have no interest in research. They are left short changed when they are lured into higher education, only to find that teaching in universities is undervalued. University teachers have no support staff to speak of, and have to do everything themselves. That is a shame.
We should place much more trust in people who live in difficult areas. Far too many people live in intolerable conditions, and the vast majority of badly run estates are represented by members of the Labour party. Many of those councillors have almost given up hope. They do not have any serious intention of giving self-determination to residents. If residents were given only a relatively small amount of money to spend, they would transform the quality of their lives--the syringes would be taken off the grass, the dog mess would be removed, and lights would be repaired the day after they were broken.
Such things are essential, but the idea of trusting the poor with any money at all is discounted in local authorities up and down the land. That is a shame and a huge mistake.
We do not consult young people seriously enough. The Government came into office claiming that they would consult more widely than ever before. They set up focus groups, and I am sure that they have been very useful. They have also introduced a raft of legislation that directly impacts on young people, but they have never seriously set out to determine the opinions of young people.
Young people have an enormous amount to offer. Very often, they know what they want--if not in detail, at least in outline. I am chairman of the steering group for the United Kingdom youth parliament. When that organisation takes shape, it will provide a representative group of young people against which policies can be tested, and from which the ideas for new policies can be derived.
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