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Mr. Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight): Is my hon. Friend not being characteristically over-generous to the Secretary of State and, indeed, the Department? In fact, it would have been clear to anyone that a major upset in funding to local authorities would result in a major upset in schools' funding. That should have been clear well before the Secretary of State assumed his present post.

Mr. Green: My hon. Friend makes a distinguished contribution to the Education and Skills Committee, and he is exactly right. Indeed, it ought to have been apparent to the Secretary of State and other Ministers that not only was the local government settlement likely to cause difficulties but many other matters under the direct control of the Government were going to cause problems, not least the Chancellor's insistence on increasing employers' national insurance contributions, which hit schools particularly hard—characteristically, 80 per cent. of a school's budget is taken up with staff costs—and the decision to increase employers' pension contributions, which came straight off the bottom line of school budgets. The bulk of the crisis has therefore been caused by decisions made inside government.

I therefore agree with my hon. Friend that the Secretary of State's apparent ignorance of the fact that the crisis was going to happen, let alone the reason why it was happening, is quite extraordinary. I can only assume that he was convinced by the announcement by the Minister for School Standards that every local education authority

"will be getting at least 3.2 per cent. per pupil increase for next year, with further increases in the following two years. No LEA will lose out in real terms as this new system is introduced".

That was the Government's formal position in the early months of this year.

Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell): The logic of my hon. Friend's argument and the comments given in the Select Committee evidence to which he referred suggest that when Ministers sought to blame hard-working LEAs for the problem, claiming that they had held back money from schools and that that is where the root of the difficulty lay, they were presenting a disgraceful travesty of the reality and that their statements were, frankly, untrue.

Mr. Green: My hon. Friend is correct. I am afraid that it is sadly characteristic of the Government that, when they are faced with a problem, their first instinct is to look not for a solution, but a scapegoat. In this case, the scapegoat was to be local education authorities. I suspect that the reason why the Government gave up on their fruitless quest for a scapegoat had nothing to do with the merits of the case, but related to the fact that many Labour-controlled authorities throughout the country were pointing out that their schools were suffering in the same way as those of Conservative-controlled authorities, which became politically unhelpful to them.

In May, in response to many LEAs of all political colours, protests from schools and the rising number of complaints about the crisis, the Department finally announced that it would allow schools to set deficit budgets and that they would be allowed to use their capital budgets for paying teachers' salaries. That was

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the first signal that the Department was beginning to accept the scale of the problem. However, I remind Ministers of what we said at the time: allowing schools to dip into money intended for capital projects as well as their reserves risks storing up even greater problems for the future. The scale of the problems that the Government have stored up with that approach to the problem is now beginning to become clear.

Mr. Nigel Waterson (Eastbourne): Does my hon. Friend agree that any school that was planning major works, which would almost certainly occur during the summer holidays, would already have committed itself to the contractors by the time that the Secretary of State panicked and made this apparent concession?

Mr. Green: My hon. Friend is right. Many head teachers have said that when a school is engaged in a major capital project, it is extremely likely that it will be carried out during the summer holidays. Given the need to book builders, it is likely that arrangements will have been made for this year long before the Government gave permission for the money to be spent elsewhere. Their gesture was therefore moderately futile as well as ill timed.

Mr. Peter Pike (Burnley): Is it not a fact that we are now spending more on our school buildings and putting an end to the decaying, crumbling schools that existed under 18 years of Tory rule? The Tories never for one moment accepted that the standard of school premises had any effect on the education of our children.

Mr. Green: If that is the best that Labour Members can come up with, they will have a lot of explaining to do to head teachers who have been told to use their capital budgets for revenue spending. Let me quote Nick Christou at East Barnet school, just one of the many affected head teachers, who has had to divert £90,000 from capital projects. He said:

"The money that I had was for repairing the roofs because they are leaking all over the place—in the maths office and textile technology room for a start. But we have to use it and run with our leaky roofs for one more year. We will just have to put buckets underneath them."

In Labour-controlled Ealing, schools are using between 70 and 100 per cent. of their reserves just to avoid another crisis this year. The Government's first response merely stored up a worse crisis for years to come.

Even once the Department and its Ministers had accepted that there was a problem, there was still an enormous gulf between the reality of life in our schools and the purported facts coming from the Government. Even in June, some in the Government were unwilling to accept the scale of the problems. On 11 June, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister

"how many teachers are facing redundancy right now?"

The Prime Minister replied:

"According to the Department for Education and Skills, there are about 500 net redundancies."

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We now know that that answer grossly underestimated the problems that schools have been facing. As my right hon. Friend said at the time:

"The reality is that the figures for redundancies are that, this year, three times as many will face the sack as last year." —[Official Report, 11 June 2003; Vol. 406, c. 673–74.]

Mrs. Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham): Does my hon. Friend agree that the number of potential redundancies is being masked? What would he say to those at my local school, Chalfonts community college, which has been forced to send out a letter to parents and guardians asking for £20 per family per term to enable it to maintain a full teaching staff and equipment to further the children's education? Is it not true that all those teachers are facing redundancy unless they get those parental contributions because the Government have kept money back from our schools?

Mr. Green: Absolutely. All that I can say to my hon. Friend is that I hope that Ministers will apologise to the head, teachers, parents and governors at her school and at many others that face similar problems.

By midsummer, even Ministers had stopped trying to bluster their way out of the crisis. Extraordinarily, one of their partial solutions was to scrap one of their own flagship policies—the school achievement award. That was truly bizarre. Only in May, the Minister for School Standards had said:

"It is right to reward the staff whose work helps pupils to learn and today's awards celebrate their achievements".

Two months later, the Secretary of State announced that too many teachers had been allowed to go to the top pay levels too quickly. In the next month, he announced that the Government would be scrapping the policy that was, according to them, intended to

"celebrate the work of the entire school community".

Clearly, 2003 is not the year to be a teacher under this Labour Government. Last week, the Secretary of State finally came close to apologising to the thousands of children facing the new school year with fewer teachers. In a webcast to welcome the new academic year, he said:

"The government make mistakes, certainly I do, my colleagues do, and the handling of the schools' funding last year was a good example of that which I am determined to put right this year."

In these circumstances, with so many teachers experiencing redundancy or facing the threat of redundancy, I am amazed that the Government have the nerve to run expensive TV advertising campaigns for teacher recruitment. There is something surreal about watching a news programme that contains an item about teachers losing their jobs just before an advert urging people to become teachers. I congratulate Ministers on their latest advert, which features large numbers of headless people. As a piece of post-modern irony commenting on the Department's performance this year, it cannot be beaten.

If the Secretary of State had admitted culpability when these problems first arose, and had created a real solution instead of merely putting off the inevitable, perhaps we would not be in a situation in which one school in five are asking parents to make contributions to keep the school system going—my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) gave an example—and in which a survey by the

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Secondary Heads Association and The Times Educational Supplement found that 2,700 teaching posts had not been filled and that 700 teachers have been made redundant. Only months ago, the Prime Minister was talking of losses in the order of 500 teachers.

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