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1.42 pm
The Secretary of State for Education and Skills (Mr. Charles Clarke): What an extraordinary speech!
Earlier today, I made a written statement on the education implications of the Budget statement made yesterday by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I confess that I am surprised that the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) has decided that it is beneath him to respond to the debate. He is the man in the shadow Cabinet who has to discuss with the shadow Chancellor the financial implications for education. I am candidly disappointed that he has not thought to give this subject the priority that most of the country will think that it deserves.
Mr. Tim Yeo (South Suffolk) (Con): That is an extraordinary statement by the Secretary of State. In the time that I have been looking after the education portfolio in the shadow Cabinet, the Government have come closer to being defeated on a major aspect of policy than at any time in the past seven years. I invite the Secretary of State to reverse his decision to absent himself from the National Union of Teachers annual conference and join me on Easter Sunday to debate the
issues that my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins) has raised in the past half-hour.
Mr. Clarke: I stand second to no one in paying tribute to the activities of the hon. Gentleman as the golfing correspondent of the Financial Times, but he has to choose whether he is dealing with education or health. The explicit choice that he has made not to consider the education debate, in this Budget of all Budgets, as the one on which he should focus his attention is genuinely extraordinary, and people should observe that fact.
Yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor set out measures to ensure stability for education, children's services and skills training and continued progress across the Department's agenda, which is crucial to the economic and social well-being of the country. He made it clear that education spending in England would grow by an average of 4.4 per cent. across the spending review period—that is, by 6 per cent. in 2005–06, by 3.6 per cent. in 2006–07 and by 3.5 per cent. in 2007–08. As a result of this settlement, education spending in the UK will be 5.6 per cent. of GDP in 2007–08, up from 5.4 per cent. in 2004–05. This major and stable advance at every level of education—a point to which I shall return—is based on experience and the advice that we are receiving from teachers in our wide national consultations.
More than 1.6 million children have benefited from free part-time nursery education for three and four-year-olds, and 400,000 children and their families in deprived areas have been helped by 524 Sure Start centres. As a result of the settlement that the Chancellor announced yesterday, the number of children's centres will rise to 1,700 by 2008, covering all 20 per cent. of the country's most disadvantaged wards.
In due course, we will announce the details of an expansion of child care places, family support services and extended schools, which bring together education, health, children's social services and child care. This settlement will provide the funding necessary to address the agenda set out in our Green Paper "Every Child Matters" and, even more important, it offers us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reverse the vicious cycle of decline that has kept people from the poorest parts of this country away from aspiration and hope for the future.
At the level of schools, as a result of the Government's class-size pledge, 350,000 five, six and seven-year-olds are no longer in classes of 31 or more. In 1997, half of all 11-year-olds went to secondary school unable to read, write or count at the necessary level. Now that figure has been reduced to a quarter. It is still too high, but it is a massive reduction from the position that we inherited. The settlement that my right hon. Friend announced yesterday will enable primary schools and teachers to continue to raise standards of literacy and numeracy, supported by work force reform and the recruitment of more teaching assistants.
In 1997, just 45.1 per cent. of pupils got five good grades at GCSE. Last year, that had increased to 52.9 per cent. and, most encouraging of all, the biggest increases were in the toughest areas. Pupils in excellence in cities areas are improving at more than twice the rate of pupils elsewhere in the country. Half of all secondary
pupils are now taught in specialist schools. I was honoured to visit such a school two or three years ago in the constituency of the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale. They are getting better results—56.7 per cent. of pupils in specialist schools get five good grades at GCSE.
Chris Grayling: Does the Secretary of State agree that many of the improvements that he talks about took place in the early years of the Labour Government? Many young people, and even today's GCSE pupils, went through much of their education under the last Conservative Government, so will he pay tribute to that Government for their contribution to the development of those young people and the improvements in their performance to which he has just referred?
Mr. Clarke: I do not wish to appear churlish, but I will not because the facts are at odds with what the hon. Gentleman has just said. The facts are that, with specialist schools and the GCSE statistics that I was giving in particular, the improvements have accelerated recently. That is the progress that has been made. It is a fact, and it is a big issue for the whole of the education service, that there has been a massive backlog of under-investment amounting to billions of pounds at all levels of education from which we have had to claw our way out. We have not done so as fast as all of us would have liked, I am sure, but we are continuing to make steady progress. I do not wish to appear churlish, but I cannot answer him in the way that he would wish. We have had a sea change in policy both in commitment and in resources, which is taking us forward in a substantial way.
Mr. Collins: The Secretary of State has just said—it is a perfectly reasonable position—that the longer the Government have been responsible for these matters, the greater share they wish to take of both the credit and the blame for what is working and what is not. Can he explain why progress towards literacy and numeracy at key stage 2 advanced up to 2000 and halted thereafter?
Mr. Clarke: I am certainly prepared to take both credit and blame. As the hon. Gentleman rightly says, the more time goes on, the more can be stated in that way. I am prepared to acknowledge to the House, as I have before, that the flattening—particularly in literacy, but also in numeracy—in the past two or three years has been a serious problem. We are addressing it seriously, and I believe that the results this year will again show a continued improvement. I have to remind him that, in 1997, half of children were leaving primary school without achieving level 4 of key stage 2 whereas now only a quarter do. There has been a fantastic improvement, but he is right that there is a fantastic lot more to do. That is the point about the settlement that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor announced yesterday.
The settlement will continue the drive to achieve excellence and to narrow the gaps in attainment between schools. It will make a reality of our commitment that every school that meets the standard will have the opportunity to gain specialist status and allow continued expansion in the number of city academies.
Over the spending review period, total departmental capital spending will rise from £3.85 billion in 2004–05 to £6.78 billion in 2007–08—a massive increase. That will ensure that, by 2015, through our "building schools for the future" programme, every secondary school in the country can be refurbished or rebuilt, with world-class technology in every school and the best state-of-the-art learning in every classroom. To accompany that new investment, we shall develop a new relationship with schools to help deliver personalised learning tailored to the talents and needs of every pupil, underpinned by a strengthened accountability framework, a simplified school improvement process and improved information and data management.
In higher education, publicly planned funding has risen dramatically under the Labour Government. Expenditure on science and research—a major theme in the Chancellor's announcement yesterday—will have increased in 2005–06 by £1.25 billion a year compared with 2002–03, which is about 30 per cent. in real terms. The settlement will allow investment in the sector to continue to grow in real terms and enable the Government to maintain real-terms student funding per head and to progress towards our target of 50 per cent. participation in higher education. It will also provide the resources needed to deliver the reforms set out in our White Paper, "The Future of Higher Education".
On lifelong learning, 255,000 young people were in modern apprenticeships in December 2003, compared with only 75,800 in 1997. It is worth noting that the Conservatives may talk about vocational education but they made no commitment—as we did—to more than treble the number of people on modern apprenticeships over that period. In 1985, 10.5 million people of working age in England had no qualifications, but in 2003, the number was 4.6 million—a massive reduction. Between 2001 and 2002, more than 300,000 adults were helped to raise their numeracy and literacy skills.
My right hon. Friend's Budget settlement will provide for new measures, through the new deal for skills, to tackle the large number of adults in the UK work force who have low skills. In jobcentres, a one-stop skills service will be offered for the employed as well as the unemployed, with access to personal skills advisers and training. By 2007, 1.5 million adults will have improved their basic skills as part of our longer-term aim of ensuring that, by 2010, the number of adults in the work force who lack NVQ2 or equivalent qualifications is reduced by at least 40 per cent.
We shall take forward the measures set out in our skills strategy to meet the needs of employers, employees and individual learners, including a key role for the new sector skills councils.
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