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7.35 pm
Dr. Desmond Turner (Brighton, Kemptown): I wish to make some brief observations on two or three of the Bills in the Queen's Speech, starting with the Freedom of Information Bill. The Secretary of State described it as a bold measure. The White Paper was certainly bold, starting from the presumption that all public information should be available subject to the test of substantial harm--something for which we have been waiting for a long time since it brings to an end the ridiculous situation where information not available in Britain can be obtained from a public library in Washington, which is patently absurd.
Unfortunately, something happened during the White Paper's translation into the Bill. I can only assume thatSir Humphrey got at it, together with his friends. The result was the introduction, at a rough count, of 24 classes of exemption. Some of those are reasonable exemptions, including the national security interest and the protection of private individuals, which no one would question. But information concerning the economy, the environment and Government decision making is crucial, and it is axiomatic
that at least the factual information that underpins Government decisions should be in the public domain. Without that, the Government cannot claim evidence- based decision making and transparent government.
Clearly, we do not want to publish confidential Cabinet memos which might be embarrassing. They will be leaked anyway, so to exempt them leaves journalists something to ferret around for--but the basic presumption of information unless there is substantial harm is the only proper way to proceed. I hope that the Secretary of State will be amenable to withdrawing many of the exemptions, or, if he wishes to retain them, at least to modifying the test so that the presumption is the publication of information unless substantial harm can be demonstrated.
The Home Secretary referred to there having been a culture change in relation to information, and that is right, but that change needs to be incorporated more firmly in the Bill than is currently the case. All information in the public domain but not released is publicly owned; it is our information. The onus is on the Government to demonstrate why it should not be released rather than to withhold it. If the Home Secretary will go just a little further than he has been prepared to go so far, we will have a Freedom of Information Bill of which we can all be proud.
The Home Secretary has taken a lot of stick tonight for the proposals on trial by jury. I must come to his defence and say that I have been convinced by his arguments. It is not the most vital issue and I may question the need for the measure, but I do not believe that it--
Mr. Peter Brooke (Cities of London and Westminster):
When the hon. Gentleman refers to the Home Secretary's arguments, does he mean those thatthe Home Secretary deployed in the last Parliament or in the current Session?
Dr. Turner:
I am speaking of the current Home Secretary.
The moral outrage that has been expressed about the infringement of personal liberties and the threat to ancient traditions which, like most of our great British traditions, do not go back further than the Victorian era, is over-hyped. That its source is the barristers' trade union gives me pause for thought.
The Queen's Speech proposed two important education measures. The first is the Bill on the Learning and Skills Council. Up to now, post-16 education has been a disorganised mess. It has grown like Topsy and has been messed about and modified, and there is no level playing field for those who work in the sector. A-level education can be obtained in four different categories of institution: the sixth form at school, sixth-form college, tertiary college or further education college. Each category is treated differently when it comes to funding administration. For example, a sixth-form college receives only 80 per cent. of the capitation for an A-level student that a school sixth form receives. Such disparities create enormous difficulties for sixth-form colleges, which suffer intense budgetary problems and increasing class sizes. My local sixth-form colleges teach classes of up to 20 students. That begins to be too large for effective A-level teaching--classes should not be too small, but they should certainly not be too large.
It makes sense to bring all the categories of institution under one organisational head. I hope that there will be a funding formula for all the institutions that gives them an even break so that a student will be worth a given amount of money regardless of the sort of institution he attends. That is fair and just.
Other anomalies should be tackled. For example, a sixth-form college can fund a pay award for its teachers only through efficiencies--by reducing the number of staff to pay the award to those who are left. Innumerable issues surround the administration of post-16 education, and the proposed Bill will give us the opportunity to tackle them. We cannot judge the Bill on the way in which it deals with those problems because it is not yet available, but I trust that the measure will take them into account.
The Learning and Skills Council will also have responsibility for curricular matters. That is important. The structure of available qualifications for those aged over 16 needs to be brought up to date. Equal value should be placed on academic and vocational education, which is of equal worth to our society. Reform of A-level syllabuses is overdue because they have become too narrow and deter students from studying some subjects that are critical to our economic future. For example, there is a crying shortage of university entrants to study physics and chemistry, which are basic, academic subjects that are important to our future industrial needs. That problem is not exclusive to this country; Germany also complains of it.
A contributory factor to the problem is that when 15-year-old students have to make their A-level choices, an A-level physics or chemistry syllabus looks hard. Indeed, it is hard and demanding. I have had the pleasure of teaching A-level chemistry, and it exemplifies all that is wrong with A-level syllabuses. Boards are happy to add different aspects to syllabuses, but they hardly ever remove anything. It is hard work to get through such a syllabus and, naturally, students choose what seem to be softer options. They are not necessarily softer; they may only seem to be so.
A-level syllabuses are narrow. If we structure them in a slightly better way, and alter university entrance requirements to take account of that, we may be able to go some way towards tackling the skills shortages that are developing, to which the structure of syllabuses may contribute. On the whole, I welcome the measure on the Learning and Skills Council and I hope that it will contribute to the vital sector of education that I have discussed.
I also welcome the Bill on special educational needs. Again, it is difficult to judge it because we know only an outline of its likely provisions. I welcome it because this is the first time that a Government have specifically legislated for special educational needs and acknowledged the value of that aspect of education. It has always been the Cinderella of education and has thus always been under-resourced. It creates more difficulties in my constituency case load than any other educational issue.
Scarcity of resources means that local education authorities are reluctant to admit to the learning difficulties that many children experience. There is no cheap, simple or universal option for children with special needs, whether they are educated in special units or special schools or integrated into mainstream schools.
Children must be assessed on their individual needs and I have great sympathy with the remarks of the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson) about that.
Mr. Phil Willis (Harrogate and Knaresborough):
I am particularly interested in the fact that, nearly four and a half hours into the debate, education is not central to it, but has merely featured at the edges. The hon. Member for Bristol, West (Valerie Davey) and I were recently in the United States and I brought back a document from there. A group of educationists from North Carolina who came to look at the United Kingdom's school system were addressed by the former dean of Oxford university's school of education, who said:
It is telling that, despite the launch of their new policies in "The Common Sense Revolution in Education", we have heard absolutely nothing from any of the Tories--not even the brigade who usually sit on the third Bench back and rough up Government Members and all of us who try to speak on education. They are all absent from the debate. They have proposed yet more of the old policies of division, and it is interesting to look at their amendment to the Loyal Address. They say that their policies are an attack on bureaucracy--"It's bureaucracy wot did it, guv"--as though there was no bureaucracy when they were in power.
I remember, as a head, receiving a lorry-load of bureaucracy when the national curriculum was introduced by John Patten in the late 1980s. A great cheer went up from my staff when we hired a 1,500 hundred weight van to take it to the tip two or three years later. The new bureaucracy is really about sacking head teachers, although the policy does not quite say that--it has changed from the little shop of horrors at Blackpool a few months ago. The Conservatives say that they will look at the administrators and managers of a school and that parents will be able to remove them. By the way, there is no bureaucracy attached to sacking a head teacher. An industrial tribunal might be held and head teachers and senior school managers might have rights in employment law, but that has totally passed the Tories by.
Parents will be able to have a school inspected every year by Ofsted, if they so wish. I have yet to come across a school in my constituency that is queueing up for Ofsted
inspections--quite the opposite. We have come to terms with Ofsted inspections, but the idea that parents could trigger a ballot every year and invite Ofsted to undertake an inspection, at a cost of about £13,000 a school, is nonsensical. The proposed admissions policy will not cause any bureaucracy either, because the new policy is to have free schools, which children will be able to choose to attend. Every school will have its own admissions policy and will be able to take as many children as it can get. There will be no limit at all, apart from the fact that the number of children is finite. What will happen when a school does not have the physical capacity to take a certain number of children? Ah well, that is the local education authority's problem--it will have to provide education and places. That is nonsense policy that goes back to the old days in terms of confusion, division and too much bureaucracy.
I was interested in today's Conservative party press release because it reveals that there will be no more money for education; it will all come from cutting down on bureaucracy. It says:
To return to the main business of the Queen's Speech, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Inverness, West (Mr. Kennedy) described the Government's programme as cautious and timid, and the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) made exactly the same comment earlier. Labour's programme gives the impression of a governing party that has lost the crusading zeal that it had in opposition. It certainly had that zeal then, but has lost it since coming to power. Indeed, I would describe the Queen's Speech--certainly in respect of education--by adapting what an old Yorkshireman once said, "Hear all, see all, promise all, but do nowt."
Timidity is apparent throughout the legislative programme, particularly on education. Where is the Bill to limit class sizes for all our children? If that is important for one group of children, why is it not important for all? Where is the Bill on transparency of funding in our education system? Why is there no Bill to make clear where and how money is spent in education? In North Yorkshire this year, we passported the £13 million that the Secretary of State said we had to spend on education. The council tax rose by 9.6 per cent., but every school in North Yorkshire had its budget cut. Why? I could not explain that to them, and nor could the right hon. Gentleman, but someone should explain.
Where is the Bill to put in place the reform of the teaching profession and the new performance-related pay structures? What are the Government afraid of? This is the most far-reaching reform ever proposed for
the profession, which will have a profound effect on every classroom in the land and on every school, yet they cannot find time even for a debate, let alone a Bill to put the reform into action. I can tell the House why: Ministers have gone back on their promise of an extra £1 billion, over and above the increases in standard spending assessment. They said that that money would be ring-fenced to meet the cost of each and every teacher who crossed the threshold.
That £1 billion was supposed to come from the service development fund announced in July last year, and£1.75 billion was allocated for 2000-02. On the same day, however, LEAs were told that education standard spending would rise by 6.2 and 6.4 per cent. respectively over those two years. Now the Government have top-sliced £430 million from local authorities, cutting the rises next year and the year after to 5.4 and 5 per cent. respectively. Once again, pay rises for some teachers are likely to be bought at the expense of other teachers' jobs. That is not the message that we got from the Government when they said that new proposals on teachers' pay would be announced. Those cuts breach the central tenet of any performance-related pay system: incentive payments must be genuinely additional if they are to work. If they come, even in small part, from existing budgets, the whole performance will be a sham.
There are two significant Bills in the Queen's Speech, and the Liberal Democrats give a cautious welcome to each of them. We have steadfastly supported the Government in their desire to get rid of a bureaucratic minefield that is confusing, difficult to negotiate and often impedes rather than encourages the learner. Those very words were used in the White Paper on post-16 education, and we agree with them, but rather than clear a path through the minefield, the Government have simply chosen to replace old mines with new ones. How else can the Secretary of State explain the plethora of organisations that are to form part of the proposed lifelong learning structure?
The Secretary of State will appoint everyone on the national Learning and Skills Council. There willbe 47 sub-regional councils, local lifelong learning partnerships, education business partnerships, the national training organisations, the new integrated youth service, the careers and guidance services, the chambers of trade and commerce, and the university for industry. Perhaps even local education authorities will get a look in--if they exist by the time the Bill is enacted, that is.
It would help if the Government's thinking about the role of many of those organisations was clear, but it is not. Will the youth support service subsume in its entirety the careers service for those aged under 19, or will it be a framework to strengthen existing collaboration between the careers service, the youth service and organisations involved with young people at risk? The previous Government devastated the careers service; they thought that it should be available to only a very few people. In fact, careers guidance is the central plank of lifelong learning.
Who will lead the new multi-tier organisation? If we believe the Department for Education and Employment press releases, everyone will. The press release of30 June said:
What will be the role of the university for industry? It has a different organisation, with different learning hubs that are not coterminous with the regional development agencies or any of the learning and skills sub-regional councils.
What will be role of the LEAs? They need not hold their breath for a press release detailing their role. Everything coming from the Government indicates that LEAs are on the way out.
May I say how pleased we are about the proposed special educational needs measure? I was also pleased that West Oaks, a special school in Leeds with which I had some dealings before my election to the House, has been given beacon school status today. It is great that special schools are being awarded beacon status--that is a role for them in future. I do not agree that the demise of some special schools signals the demise of special education provision.
We have come a long way since Mary Warnock's report in 1979. I spent 20 years working in inclusive education, and I resent the assertion that high-quality education for children with special needs cannot be delivered in an inclusive setting. It can be, and that should be the Government's objective. But those working in LEAs and schools believe that the number of statements and the resources that are applied to them are geared to the availability of resources, rather than the needs of the child. Parents are regularly told that there is no point in issuing a statement because the authority is over budget and cannot make the relevant provision. Parents of any SEN child will say that they have lost their trust in the LEAs as a result of the basic disregard for the current legal entitlements of children with special educational needs. We must not put another measure on to the statute book that cannot be implemented in practice in our schools and LEAs.
The identification of need is often too simplistic. Meeting the child's need is often a lottery. Inclusive education is, for many children, not just one option but the only option. The Bill must provide the foundation to make their education high quality, and it should address the concerns of parents.
"I want to welcome you to our educational laboratory. You may conclude it is run by mad scientists and that you have had the opportunity to see it before it explodes".
That is an apt description of what I suffered for 18 years as an educationist under the previous Administration.
"This morning we're launching the biggest schools consultation that a British political party has ever undertaken.
I can tell the House that head teachers, who are up to their eyes in documentation, need another document to fill in like they need a hole in the head. The Tories are attacking bureaucracy by giving them more bureaucracy to deal with, but the press release goes further, saying:
We're contacting every school in the country so we can get their comments on this new document".
"That's not to say that we haven't been busy listening already. The Common Sense Revolution in Education was put together after we consulted teachers".
The Tories are having a second round of consultation, and the debate could not go by without our spending a few minutes discussing the common-sense, or, rather, non-sense revolution.
"employers would have the largest single input".
23 Nov 1999 : Column 544
The press release of 5 October told training providers that they had
By 20 October, the national training organisations were in fashion. The press release said:
"a crucial role in raising standards".
"NTOs have a pivotal role in identifying future skills needs".
Seven days later, the NTOs were out of favour, and it was the turn of lifelong learning partnerships to take the lead. The DFEE press release said:
"Blackstone sets out crucial role of lifelong learning partnerships".
But by 28 October, employers were back in fashion according to the DFEE:
"Business gets biggest say in Learning and Skills Network".
The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe was right: we need to know who will be leading the programme, and so does the business sector. With so many organisations involved, unless the arrangements are pulled together properly, we will be back in the mire.
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