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Mr. Green: That is absolutely consistent.
Mr. Miliband: The hon. Gentleman says that that is absolutely consistent, but how can it be consistent for him to say that the Conservatives do not oppose the spending increases, but for his party's policy guide to say that they do? That seems quite a contradiction.
The Leader of the Opposition then went further. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the quiet man said:
- "I explicitly on three separate occasions when asked said we will not match Government spending plans."
Mr. Green: Let me resolve the confusion in the Minister's mind. What we oppose is the way that his Government waste huge amounts of taxpayers' money. We think that money spent in the education budget should go to schools and be spent on decisions taken by heads and governors and teachers. It should not be wasted on bureaucracy, in a way that causes teaching redundancies all over the country even when the Government are taxing people more than ever before. It is the way that the Government tax and spend that lets them down. That is why the British people do not trust the Minister or the Prime Minister any more.
Mr. Miliband: The hon. Gentleman will regret prolonging this discussion because I can assure him that we shall return to the point again and again in the years ahead. He obviously was not listening to what I said, because his own policy guide says in clear terms that the Conservatives do not support the tax and spending increases that the Government have announced. His own leader explicitly said:
- "We will not match Government spending plans."
Mr. Miliband: I beg the hon. Lady's pardon, but I shall ask her to intervene once I have made my point.
It is not just the Opposition's words but their actions that tell their position. Every time they have had a chance to vote on spending increases they have not, it is true, quibbled, but they have sought to tear up the spending increases and deny them to schools. On money to fund the new deal for schools, which will be of interest to my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike), the Opposition voted against. On cutting class sizes, they voted against. The 1998 spending review, which raised school spending by £340 per pupil, they denounced as reckless. The 2000 spending review raised spending by a further £370 per pupil but was described as irresponsible and imprudent. The 2002 spending review delivering this year's rises in teachers' pay was denied the support of the Opposition.
The Conservative party is a party of serial quibblers, serial opposers, and serial voters against money for schools, money for teachers, money for books and money for buildings.
Mrs. Gillan: I seek some clarity from the Minister. He says that everything in the garden is rosy and that so much money is coming down the line from the Government that our schools, teachers, governors and parents have nothing to worry about. Can he give me a clear recommendation for the parents of the children who go to Chalfonts community college? Would he tell those parents not to pay the £20 per term for their children's teachers and equipment, or would he tell them to pay the money because it is necessary? May we have some clear guidance on that? Is the instruction to the parents to pay the money to maintain the school or not?
Mr. Miliband: I could not have made clearer at the beginning of my speech the fact that there are serious
problems in some schools. I must have said so up to half a dozen times. Of course I do not pretend that everything is—
Mr. Miliband: The hon. Lady was very patient in waiting to ask her question, but might show a bit of patience in waiting for the answer. I did not say that everything in the garden is rosy. It would be absurd of me to make a recommendation to parents of a school in her constituency without knowing any of the details. Indeed, it would be quite wrong of me to do so in any case. For many years schools have undertaken fund-raising drives in all sorts of ways. It would be odd of Ministers to give them commands. I do know that the efforts of parents and the wider community to raise funds for schools are much better suited to a situation in which funding is rising rather than falling.
Mr. Miliband: The hon. Gentleman says so, but we have been through this before. When his party was in office between 1992 and 1997 spending fell by around £100 per pupil in real terms.
I do not want to try the patience of the House, so I shall try to come to a conclusion.
James Purnell (Stalybridge and Hyde): I do not think that my hon. Friend is trying anyone's patience. Does he recall visiting Hyde technology college in my constituency, and has he seen that results there have gone up from 50 per cent. of students gaining five A to C grades to 63 per cent. of students doing so? Will he agree to visit some more schools in my constituency so that he can try to have the same effect?
Mr. Miliband: I wish I could have that effect on every school in every constituency that I visit. I do remember my visit to Hyde technology college, which is an extremely impressive school boasting committed teachers, governors and pupils. I am delighted to hear of the significant increase in GCSE performance. We announced A to C rates for entries at GCSE in August, and the evidence that I heard from Labour Members in the Lobby last night was that rates of achievement of five A to C grades by pupils around the country far exceed that. The evidence that my hon. Friend has just adduced is relevant in that regard. I take seriously his further offer of hospitality and look forward to trying to take it up on some occasion.
Schools face serious problems this year, as I have repeatedly said, but we are determined to overcome those problems in partnership with head teachers and local authorities. This is the year when the majority of secondary schools will achieve specialist status. This is the year when 1,400 of our toughest schools receive the leadership incentive grant. This is the year when capital investment tops £3.8 billion a year and when teachers have the first contractual change in their work load for a generation.
According to all the international comparisons, we are doing well, but the Government are determined to do better. That is our commitment and I commend our amendment to the House.
5.50 pm
Dr. John Pugh (Southport): May I apologise for not being my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis)? I am not entirely sure that is something for which I should apologise, as there is little I can do about it, but I wanted to underline the point that the debate will be much poorer without his searching, yet always constructive, critique of Government policy. Even as I speak, my hon. Friend is pushing back the frontiers of education in some other place—not, of course, the other place—and I am bereft of his counsel.
I feel somewhat exposed standing here without a Dispatch Box or my customary barrier to lean on, and heavily outnumbered to boot. However, as the Government have adopted an anti-bullying strategy, perhaps I can afford to relax—[Interruption.]. An hon. Member points out that the strategy is only for the under-fives.
Unsurprisingly, the proposition is that the Government are a bad lot. They have got school funding wrong, have tried to blame local authorities and, in triggering redundancies, have jeopardised promising agreements to reduce teacher work loads and created problems for teacher recruitment and retention. That, I understand, is the objection, as set out by the Tory motion.
That thesis was significantly improved by the Liberal Democrat amendment, which unfortunately was not chosen. Our amendment pointed out that previous Conservative Governments created, if anything, bigger financial problems for schools. That sophistication adds a measure of fairness and historical perspective to the original motion.
The Government amendment appears to consist of a recognition of the problem, a clutch of partial truths and a dose of self-congratulation. I fail to see why the refined Liberal Democrat amendment should not commend itself to any rational Member of the House and I shall endeavour to provide evidence.
When it became apparent that schools had problems, the Government clearly, and perhaps genuinely, thought that their ambitious plans to pass money to schools had been foiled by avaricious or acquisitive local authorities, which might have used the money for other purposes. On 2 May, and even before, they began an assault on local authorities that must, I guess, retrospectively embarrass Ministers and which they will not want repeated or even alluded to in this place. However, although it is tactless of me to mention it, we need to dwell on it for a while.
By the time the Select Committee on Education and Skills had got around to examining the fiasco and Mr. Normington had given his evidence, even the Government's advisers were talking not of the perfidy of local authorities but of the failure of modelling—whatever that means. In essence, in ordinary parlance, they had got their sums wrong.
It is unkind of me to rake the matter up, as I am sure that Ministers would like to bury the infamous press release of 2 May, which contained the amusingly ironic statement:
- "The purpose of this exercise is not to apportion blame."
Only this week, a paper from a constituency adjacent to mine carried a telling headline, which was promoted neither by me nor by my party. It stated simply:
- "Whitehall dunces get new term budget sums wrong."
I know two things about the new deal for schools. First, it will be discussed with what are now known as the Government's partners in education. Secondly, the aspiration is that things will be transparent. Sceptics and perhaps even cynics will see the Treasury's hand in that, because things are not transparent. Could it be that the Treasury or the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister would like the school funding spending share to be opaque, rather than transparent? Could it be that it is not so much a generous promise by the Secretary of State to open his coffers, but more an instruction to councils to extract more cash from council tax payers?
We will find out soon enough, but we may be back to the old game of standard spending assessments and passporting, which have long since been rumbled and will continue to be so. That may be unkind; the Secretary of State impresses me as a man of natural generosity. [Interruption.] I will apply that comment to other Ministers as well; perhaps they have the same disposition. The Secretary of State is even prepared to make handouts from his own Department's money, and he referred in his statement to something called end-of-term flexibility, which most of us would call an underspend. Hon. Members would agree that £1.2 billion, or whatever the figure may be, is an awful lot of flexibility and that school bursars would genuinely like a bit of flexibility too.
A key problem in the new settlement—I should like the Minister to listen to this specific point and to respond to it—is that local authority special education budgets will be constrained under the new regime. Local authorities will be constrained in the amount by which school budgets increase. Everyone accepts that special education budgets are demand-led—they are controlled by the rights of parents and those of the children themselves—and that individual cases can be
extraordinarily expensive. The net effect of that artificial constraint can only be to open the door to worrying litigation involving individual cases, as councils try to constrain their budgets in line with an artificial limit and seek to keep down costs. I want to flag up that concern, and I should like the Minister to respond to it in summing up.Moving to the positive side, the Secretary of State and other Ministers will be reassured to discover that I am sending a copy of the reassuring statement issued on 17 July to every school in my constituency, and I hope that, in turn, it will be pinned up in staff rooms, so that staff and governors can study it in the dark days of November and February. It will act as a powerful reassurance for their doubts. If, perchance, all does not come to pass as they expect, they will know who has misled them.
Teachers will not necessarily be reassured by the current tranche of statistics thrown down by the Government. They will not be reassured by people telling them that there are an extra 25,000 teachers because that figure includes trainees, instructors and people without qualified status. They will not be reassured by talk of 3,000 more graduates opting to teach because they read the papers and know that one in three people gives up the profession after about three years. They know for a fact, from their own experience, that there are acute shortages in some subjects and in some areas, such as the south-east. They know that, according to The Times Educational Supplement, 700 teachers were made redundant this year and that four times that number of jobs were not renewed. As has been said, the school work force statement issued today has given no comfort that things will get a great deal better. It has certainly given the teaching unions and schools no such comfort, and those figures, which show a decline, were documented before the current fiasco, so there may be worse figures to come.
It is worth standing back and asking who—apart from parents, staff and the Government—is a significant casualty of this sad episode in educational history, where the Government got their sums wrong, as we all have to acknowledge. My local constituency research seems to show that there is another major and perhaps unspoken casualty—classroom assistants. Their terms and conditions of employment are less certain and it might be easier to let them go when financial circumstances get worse. Any sizable reduction in their numbers could have near fatal consequences on the work load agreement. There seem to be problems with the agreement anyway—perhaps expectations are pitched too high—but whatever its merits, it will not work if budgetary pressures lead to the shedding of support staff. That piece of information might be shown to be true later this year.
Added to that, no Minister has given any guarantee that the money for the work load agreement will be ring-fenced. For all that I understand, it might well be muddled in with other expenditure. The money will be in the local authority grant and people will be asked to identify it. That might be a symptom of Treasury caution overriding the natural generous instincts of Education Ministers. I shall be glad if the Minister
contradicts me on that point but I doubt that he will, and nor do I think that he will give me any guarantee that no child will be taught by unqualified staff next year—we have every expectation that many will.To sum up, there is clear substance in the Opposition's charge that the Government have imperilled what is, on the face of it, a decent initiative. It must be said that there is little evidence of the Conservatives wanting to provide additional substantial resources to improve matters. We must accept that the Government are guilty of blundering rather than callous deceit. They have found their exposed position uncomfortable and they do not welcome a re-run. They know for a fact that educationalists are not stupid and that they are hard to deceive. Their only option now—I commend it to them—is to take the path of complete honesty and transparency. They should not hide behind local authorities or obscure formulae but give schools the financial stability that they need to do the job that the Government and the country want done.
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