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Staff Travel

Mr. Bercow: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills what the cost was of travel by train by staff in his Department in 2002. [106336]

Mr. Stephen Twigg: The cost of travel by train by staff within my Department in 2002 was approximately £5 million. Departmental staff have a responsibility to give due consideration to cost when planning any official travel and extensive guidance is provided on how to get the best out of official travel. This guidance covers items such as method of travel, environmental impact and effective use of time.

Standards Fund

Mr. Dismore: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills how many (a) local education authorities and (b) schools were in receipt of the maximum entitlement under the standards fund in 2002–03. [107219]

Mr. Miliband [holding answer 4 April 2003]: The Standards Fund is a programme of Government grants to local education authorities to support a range of national education priorities, such as the national literacy and numeracy strategies, support for Specialist Schools, measures to raise the level of achievement of pupils from ethnic minorities, the Excellence in Cities initiative and capital projects. The grant is paid to local education authorities and most is then devolved to schools. Funding is distributed according to the requirements of each grant and there is no maximum entitlement. A local education authority will not necessarily receive an allocation for every Standards Fund priority. For example, not all authorities are part of the Excellence in Cities initiative, which is designed to raise performance through a targeted programme addressing the educational problems of our major cities.

The following table gives the total grant allocated to the London education authorities for the 2002–03 Standards Fund programme, showing the split between recurrent and capital grant.

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2002–03 standards fund grant allocated to London education authorities£

Local education authority	Revenue grant	Capital grant	Total grant
Barking	9,139,219	11,320,167	20,459,386
Barnet	9,831,950	6,364,646	16,196,596
Bexley	6,548,557	5,478,844	12,027,401
Brent	12,254,901	5,297,419	17,552,320
Bromley	7,970,161	6,288,876	14,259,037
Camden	11,769,858	3,366,083	15,135,941
Corporation of London	232,638	140,495	373,132
Croydon	11,031,930	6,064,810	17,096,740
Baling	12,836,244	6,432,633	19,268,877
Enfield	13,355,641	9,230,884	22,586,526
Greenwich	15,794,953	9,663,911	25,458,865
Hackney	14,427,947	7,860,657	22,288,604
Hammersmith and Fulham	9,697,678	2,866,870	12,564,548
Haringey	15,745,570	6,815,522	22,561,093
Harrow	5,715,266	4,130,761	9,846,028
Havering	6,109,974	5,692,216	11,802,190
Hillingdon	8,218,097	7,255,036	15,473,133
Hounslow	11,152,515	5,923,770	17,076,285
Islington	13,058,206	3,751,636	16,809,841
Kensington and Chelsea	6,797,691	1,670,060	8,467,751
Kingston Upon Thames	4,375,605	5,614,948	9,990,553
Lambeth	13,553,014	5,366,334	18,919,348
Lewisham	15,825,426	7,361,924	23,187,349
Merton	5,263,909	3,703,518	8,967,428
Newham	20,916,362	7,799,005	28,715,367
Redbridge	8,351,069	5,623,887	13,974,956
Richmond Upon Thames	3,688,102	2,872,799	6,560,901
Southwark	16,514,403	5,101,928	21,616,331
Sutton	5,100,801	4,418,675	9,519,476
Tower Hamlets	22,441,941	7,394,838	29,836,779
Waltham Forest	14,274,858	7,977,398	22,252,256
Wandsworth	11,198,485	5,374,328	16,572,812
Westminster	8,835,215	2,560,950	11,396,165

Mr. Dismore: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills what plans he has to review the proposed changes to the Standards Fund for 2004–05 in the light of this year's experience. [107220]

Mr. Miliband [holding answer 4 April 2003]: The Government have announced that over the spending review period the proportion of funding provided to local education authorities and schools through ring-fenced grants will be reduced. The particular arrangements for Standards Fund are reviewed annually in the light of experience.

Students

Mr. Boswell: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills what his estimate is of the time needed to repay a student loan after 2006 on the assumptions of (a) a top-up fee of £3,000 a year, (b) average earnings through the repayment period and (c) current levels of income taxation and inflation. [105304]

Margaret Hodge: The repayments on student loans vary according to the income of the individual borrower. The time taken by an individual to repay a student loan will depend upon many factors such as: the amount borrowed; their salary and the rate of growth of their earnings each year as they progress through their career; and whether they take a career break or experience spells of unemployment (when no repayments would be made because their income would be too low), it will also depend on whether they make any additional voluntary repayments from their own resources or from their employer.

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Mr. Love: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills how many BEd students were in their fourth year of studies in each of the last five years. [97937]

Margaret Hodge: The latest available data are shown in the following table. We are unable to provide data on the number of undergraduate students who were in the fourth year of a four-year BEd course for 1998–99.

	1999–2000a	2000–01a	2001–02b	2002–03b
Number of trainees	4,703	4,621	4,293	3,455

Notes:

1. Trainees in England only.

2. Due to the lack of a complete time series from one data source for the number of fourth year BEd students we have used two different data sources for the table.

a Source of data for 1999–2000 and 2000–01 is from the TTA's performance profiles.

b Source of data for the 2001–02 and 2002–03 is the TTA ITT Census.

In recent years, there has been a shift away from four-year undergraduate courses of initial teacher training towards three-year courses. In 1998–99, 70 per cent. of new undergraduate trainees started four-year courses and 23 per cent. three-year courses. By 2002–03, only 53 per cent. of new undergraduates were starting four-year courses and 43 per cent. three-year courses. Between 4–8 per cent. of undergraduate entrants have begun courses of other lengths each year since 1998–99. There has also been a progressive shift from undergraduate teacher training to the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) route. In the five years up to 2002–03, the number of students on PGCE courses rose by 34 per cent., from 17,415 to 23,324. Together, these factors have more than compensated for the fall in the numbers of trainees starting four-year undergraduate courses.

Telephone Helplines

Mr. Lazarowicz: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills pursuant to his Answer of 6 February 2003, Official Report, column 360W, on telephone helplines, how many calls were made to each helpline charged at national rate in the last year for which records are available; and what the average duration was of these calls. [105897]

Mr. Stephen Twigg: The number of telephone calls made to each of the three helplines charged at national rate and the average duration of these calls for the period 1 March 2002 to 28 February 2003 were as follows:

Helpline	Number of calls	Average length of call (minutes seconds)
Department's Public Enquiry Point (PEU)	165,380	02.45
Laptops for Teachers	2,316	01.48
Curriculum On Line (this helpline began in November 2002. These figures cover 1 November 2002 to 28 February 2003).	2,022	03.18

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Tuition Fees

Paul Farrelly: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills if he will publish the evidence his Department has collated from (a) the United States, (b) Australia, (c) Canada and (d) New Zealand on the impact of differential tuition fees on access to university for students from different socio-economic backgrounds. [104666]

Margaret Hodge [holding answer 31 March 2003]: Our new policy has been informed by evidence from many countries as to how best to balance the burdens of funding higher education. We are confident that the approach set out in the White Paper, which balances additional fees with grants, a higher repayment threshold, enhanced outreach work by universities, clearer information on the costs of HE; and the creation of the access regulator will all ensure that we will widen access for students from less advantaged backgrounds while we expand towards 50 per cent.

Mr. Wray: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills how much student university tuition fees have been in each year since 1998; and if he will make a statement. [106084]

Margaret Hodge: The maximum contribution to tuition fees for full-time undergraduates in England and Wales attending courses at publicly-funded institutions of higher education has been uprated annually since 1998 on the basis of price inflation. The relevant figures are:

£

	Contribution
1998–99	1,000
1999–2000	1,025
2000–01	1,050
2001–02	1,075
2002–03	1,100

Only those who can afford to do so are asked to make a contribution to their tuition fees. Latest available figures, for the academic year 2000–01, show that some 61 per cent. of students were assessed to make either a nil or partial contribution to their fees.

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