---

The Secretary of State for Education and Skills (Mr. Charles Clarke): Just to inform the House that I met my constituents to discuss that and they are making no redundancies at Fairway middle school.

Mr. Green: This year possibly. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman would like to respond to Richard Arrowsmith, the head teacher of Grove school in Market Drayton, who summed up the situation perfectly. He said:

"We have lost confidence in the Government over the way in which school finance is administered . . . With cuts outstripping the funds available for extra support staff, it will also be difficult for us to reduce excessive workloads on teachers."

Mr. Keith Simpson (Mid-Norfolk): My hon. Friend is aware that the Secretary of State is the Member of Parliament for Norwich, South, and he just replied to a specific constituency point. Does he know that in a conversation that I had with Norfolk education committee last night, it stressed that it is working hard with local schools but still anticipates 92 redundancies? Teachers and governors are in no doubt where the blame lies—it lies with the Secretary of State. It has been documented in dozens of letters and e-mails through the local Eastern Daily Press. The buck stops with him.

Mr. Green: My hon. Friend is right. There is a crisis in the Secretary of State's constituency and crises in many other constituencies, too. In the week when the Government launched their new strategy for London schools, we hear reports of the man that they have in charge, Tim Brighouse, saying:

"this is the worst of times"

and

"It is the worst dislocation of funding we have all experienced in our own working lifetime."

15 May 2003 : Column 496

When the London schools tsar criticises the Government like that, Ministers' complacency is completely out of place. That man has been brought in by Labour to lead education reform in the capital.

On top of all that, Sir Jeremy Beecham, a leading Labour councillor and leader of the Local Government Association, said:

"Local councils are not holding back millions of pounds. Much of these funds are being allocated to a range of educational needs and some are due to be distributed in the year."

Rather than the Department leading the partnership with all those people, we instead have confrontation and a breakdown of communication that has succeeded in alienating teachers, heads, local authorities, teacher unions and the Local Government Association. The problem is not just a one-year problem. It will continue to haunt schools in future years. Making them dig into their reserves to fund the Department's mistakes will only make matters worse and it attacks the financial security of all schools that have to do that.

One long-term effect of the Government's policy is that it will damage their so-called historic work load agreement, which has promised so much and, on current progress, will deliver so little. Only last week, the National Association of Head Teachers, one of the teacher unions that signed up to the agreement originally, said that it would be "impossible to implement" because of the Government's cuts and that it was considering pulling out of it. On top of that, reports last week showed that the work load agreement will only continue to add to the pressures that schools face, with costs of teaching assistants expected to rise by up to 40 per cent. in some local authorities. So those schools that are short of cash now will have to contend with even more problems in the future.

The long-term solution is a radical simplification of the funding system. The Government can no longer introduce dozens of different funding streams, each one representing a new gimmick to provide a ministerial press release. Even when they are good and useful gimmicks, the cumulative effect of the constant fiddling is to leave schools unable to take decisions. Let us take power away from Ministers and give it to heads and governors so that they make the key decisions about priorities in their schools.

Ideally, we need to introduce a national funding formula so that never again are schools forced into a situation like the current crisis. Schools should know where they stand with regard to their funding and should be able to set budgets accordingly, securing their financial future. Instead of that, we have a classic new Labour crisis, which goes through several phases: the grand announcement, the ministerial boasting, then the investigation of the small print, the rumblings of discontent, the explosion of the crisis, the desperate search for a scapegoat, and eventually the humiliation of the ministerial climbdown. We saw it with individual learning accounts; we saw it with the A-level crisis; and now we have seen it with school funding.

But this crisis is too important to remain with Ministers. For once they do need to accept responsibility. Let me give them one last example from a head who phoned me less than an hour ago, Mrs. Maureen Martin of Coloma convent girls school, a comprehensive in Croydon. Her school is short of

15 May 2003 : Column 497

£400,000. It has no reserves and her capital budget, which the Minister wants her to raid, is £77,000. Today's announcement does not lift the cloud over her excellent school, and she, for one, is not being taken in by the ministerial spin.

I hope that Ministers reflect on their work. If one teacher or one teaching assistant is made redundant as a result of the present crisis, one Minister should follow suit. I suspect that the Minister for School Standards is first in the queue, but I dare say that those who are trying to rescue our schools system will not mind. The Government have let down heads, parents and teachers throughout the country, and it is time that Ministers took responsibility for their failures. I commend our motion to the House.

2.30 pm

The Secretary of State for Education and Skills (Mr. Charles Clarke) : I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:

"applauds the increased funding that the Government has made available to LEAs since 1997, which is up in real terms from £2,800 per pupil to £3,600 for 2003–04, with further planned increases to almost £3,800 by 2005–06; notes that the increase in funding for 2003–04, at £2.7 billion, more than covers the additional cost pressures from pay, pension and price increases; recognises that the new LEA funding formula constitutes a welcome move towards a fairer distribution between LEAs, but coupled with the changes to the Standards Fund has resulted in some turbulence in the system; endorses the action the Government has taken in response, namely to provide a further £11 million to London authorities and £28 million to authorities with the lowest overall increases; further notes that the performance pay grant for 2003–04 has been increased to meet all of schools' commitments arising from the grant provided in 2002–03, and to cover the costs of similar progress for teachers becoming eligible for performance pay in September; welcomes the decision by the great majority of LEAs to pass on in full the increase in schools funding to their schools budgets; supports the work the Government is doing with LEAs to understand the decisions they have taken in distributing their funding between central services and the individual budgets of schools; welcomes the further measures the Secretary of State is taking to provide LEAs and schools with flexibilities to avoid excessive instability within schools; and calls on the Government to consider what changes are needed for next year."

I am delighted to have the debate. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Green) was not able to persuade the shadow Cabinet to hold it two weeks ago, as he announced to the National Union of Teachers conference, but it is important to be able to debate the subject fully and directly. We ought to start with the origins of the situation.

Mr. Keith Simpson: Medieval history.

Mr. Clarke: Not medieval history, but practical politics today.

The funding of schools is a shared responsibility between national and local government, and we have shown over the recent period, and will show in future, a determination to work together to resolve the issues. I take the national level first. We allocated an increase in spending of £2.7 billion to schools in this year. The funding pressures, including teachers pay, pensions and national insurance—the various issues highlighted by the hon. Member for Ashford—were about £2.45 billion nationally, so we had an excess over the funding pressures of £200 million to £250 million.

15 May 2003 : Column 498

The funding was at a level of about 11.6 per cent. per pupil increase in that year—a significant increase. It was, by the way, the continuation of a long record of education investment since 1997, which has led to an extra 20,000 teachers across the country, an extra 80,000 support staff, and 20,000 schools benefiting directly from investment in them—a sharp contrast with the 20 per cent. cuts in education proposed by the Opposition.

There were two national changes—

Michael Fabricant (Lichfield): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The Secretary of State may have inadvertently told an untruth to the House. As you know, no such cuts are being proposed.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: That is not a point of order. It is a matter for debate.

---