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Geraint Davies (Croydon, Central) (Lab): It is a great pleasure to follow the 25-minute contribution made by the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Sir Sydney Chapman). I appreciate that he took a little time because he is the only Conservative Back Bencher in the Chamber for this enormously important debate, despite the fact that the Conservative party is launching its manifesto pledges on education today.
Our children's life chances are built on our educational investment and the standard of teaching delivery in our local schools. It is clear from the debate that we all know that London faces many specific challenges, such as the cost of housing, inadequate wages, the problems with London weighting that the hon. Gentleman outlined, the environment, multiculturalism, multilingualism and the problems of mobility mentioned by the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes). It is important for all those factors to be considered when calculating London's financial weighting, but despite the critical problems and the growth of costs and pressures, it is interesting to note that the formula spending share for London—the amount of funding for our schools in relative terms—has converged with that of the rest of the country over the past couple of years. Spending on London's schools is thus no longer obviously greater than that on schools outside the area, despite the fact that challenges remain.
I take this opportunity to congratulate warmly all people who are involved in our schools because, as the Minister suggested, evidence from the London challenge shows that despite the problems that I cited, more value has been added to our primary and secondary schools in London than to those in the rest of the country. That is of great credit to those who work in the profession in London.
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We have made a lot of progress in London and elsewhere, especially on primary schools. My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Roger Casale) talked about the possibility of people moving from the private to the public sector in the future, and I think that that is happening in primary schools. We have invested in provision for three and four-year-olds, and we are beginning to see the fruits of investing more in secondary school provision.
Recruitment and retention have always been big challenges for London, so I am pleased by new incentives to encourage further recruitment, which are making a difference in Croydon. I give a great welcome to the £100,000 grants, or interest-free loans, that are available for teachers who have spent between four and seven years in their posts, yet might move elsewhere in the country. That scheme is beginning to make a difference in Croydon. The new agenda to encourage face-to-face youth work is being embraced and represents a valuable re-engineering of the previous budget. I welcome the co-ordinated admission approach on which the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) commented. The bottom line is that a common application system with data shared among all schools will lead to pupils getting school places earlier because people will not hold on to an excessive number of places, which denies other pupils any place at all. The system will become more transparent and efficient, and although that will not deliver more choice in itself, choice will become available earlier.
In Croydon each year, about 1,000 pupils at secondary level—a third—move into schools in the borough and 1,000 move out. About 1,000 pupils come down from Lambeth and Southwark, while 1,000 move out to Sutton, Bromley and the private sector in three equal tranches. The pupils who go to Sutton and Bromley enter the grammar school system, so parents living in Sutton and Bromley whose children do not get into grammar schools and do not want them to enter the secondary modern system send their children to Croydon. In other words, Croydon takes some of the rejects from grammar schools in Sutton and Bromley, and people also drift down from Lambeth and Southwark. Funding is organised not on the basis of who goes to school in the area but who lives in the borough, which can cause problems. In recent years, the disparity in standards attained by children leaving Croydon and those arriving has narrowed significantly. The standard attained by children from Southwark and Lambeth, for example, has improved following the Government's investment in primary education. At key stage 2, for example, most children leaving Croydon and those arriving achieve level 4 or 5.
Despite capping, there is still a problem with funding in Croydon. The hon. Member for Chipping Barnet alluded to the basic cause—a formula change at a time of rising pensions and salaries and the requirement that teachers work a little less to focus on their core duties. I am, however, happy to report to the Minister that despite the worst fears of heads in Croydon, there were no compulsory redundancies last year, the overall school balance did not fall from £11 million to £3 million as predicted—in fact, it is stable at about £10 million—and only two schools drew on their capital. Government money has been passported to Croydon schools, but we
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have other problems. Council tax has been capped and the formula change has resulted in less funding for schools, but the squeeze is harder in other areas. Croydon schools have enjoyed many successes, and New Addington education action zone—now an excellence in cities project—has been particularly successful under the leadership of Pat Holland. Various schools are pushing up their standards. Recently, Addington high school achieved improvements in pipeline results. Ashburton school is using the private finance initiative to regenerate itself. I hope that the lessons described by my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon will be taken on board.
Pupil referral units were mentioned by the hon. Member for Upminster, but it is important to remember that under this Administration all children who are excluded will receive full-time education and will not roam the streets, as they did in the Tory days, committing crimes. Seventy per cent. of children in pupil referral units in Croydon go on to further education and do not, as they did under the Conservatives, take up a life of crime and repeat offending. The Minister and other Members said that we need to focus on how well black boys in particular do in school. We need to consider whether education is successfully delivered to those children, but we also need to consider whether there is a pervasive culture of it not being cool to study. Children must be told that their future financial welfare and what they can do with their life chances will be determined by their educational output, and we need attractive role models to deliver that message.
Other Members wish to contribute to our debate, so I shall conclude. In Croydon, the Government have invested in provision for three and four-year-olds, primary classes and secondary schools. It is crucial that we get it right in secondary schools if we are to fulfil our ambition of getting 50 per cent. of people into university. People opt out of the state sector and take up private provision so that their children can have a launch pad for university. The challenge for us is to bring those people back, as we have done in the health service and primary schools, through proper investment and quality control in secondary schools, and I am sure that we will rise to it.
3.24 pm
Dr. Vincent Cable (Twickenham) (LD): I thank the hon. Member for Croydon, Central (Geraint Davies) for making a brief speech. There have been some long speeches, so he has provided me with an opportunity to speak, and I shall try to speak for less than 10 minutes so that other Members may speak.
Our debate has clearly demonstrated a diversity of experience. There is an enormous gulf between the problems in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) and those in Twickenham. None the less, our conclusions are broadly similar. My constituency highlights not merely the different problems of inner and outer London, but the differences between primary and secondary education. We have the best results in standard assessment tests for 11-year-olds, not just in London but in Britain, which is a remarkable performance. There is a sense of excitement and achievement in local primary schools, where positive thinking is in evidence. The population is highly
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educated and the staff are drawn from a large pool of highly educated, professionally qualified women. The council—Liberal Democrat for many years, but now Conservative—has funded the primary school sector above standard spending assessment levels, and that is one of the many reasons why our primary schools have done extremely well.
The secondary sector undoubtedly includes some very good schools and displays some good teaching standards, but a key statistic shows that 40 per cent. of parents migrate to the private sector. They are not escaping from bad schools—their experience is very different from that of parents in central London—but are going to the private sector because of head-to-head competition with some of the finest private independent schools in the country, including St. Paul's, Lady Eleanor Holles and Hampton. There is a graphic visual image in Hanworth road in my constituency, where two independent day schools—Lady Eleanor Holles and Hampton—are sited side by side. Next to them is a local community school, Hampton community college, which is much smaller and less well equipped. There is some good teaching there and some good pupils, but there are also challenging pupils. For a local parent with enough money to afford private education the choice is therefore a no-brainer. It is extremely difficult for the state secondary sector to maintain effective competition with the independent schools in the circumstances, and the problem is percolating down to primary schools. I recently had a slightly surreal interview with the head teacher of a highly successful junior school, whose SATs results are among the best in Britain. He was suffering from falling school rolls, because parents are taking their children out of his school to prepare them for common entrance, so that they do not miss out on an independent education.
What are we to do about that problem? We are long past the stage of arguing that we should get rid of the independent sector. That is not going to happen, and many independent schools are fine educationally on their own terms. What is the Government's agenda on collaboration between the independent and state sector? How can that be managed in a constructive way? There have been token efforts in the past, such as the joint use of rowing clubs. There have been attempts at joint projects, none of which, as far as I know, has led to anything. Is there any way in which the currently rather competitive and destructive relationship can be made more positive?
There is a link between that problem and the second problem, which is the Greenwich judgment. My hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) mentioned that, and I echo his remarks about its damaging effects on constituencies such as mine. It just happens that there is a perfect symmetry between the large-scale migration of pupils into the private sector and the scale of migration into the borough from other boroughs. About 40 per cent. of all places are filled by out-of-borough pupils. The two problems are linked because as more out-of-borough pupils—many of them challenging, to use the jargon word—come into the secondary schools, growing numbers of local parents send their children into the private sector. The problem becomes cumulative.
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The Greenwich judgment is damaging in several respects. Large numbers of parents feel a strong sense of grievance that they cannot get their children into local schools, whereas others from across the border can do so. That leads to a great distortion in the school building programme, because the local council of whatever party is unwilling to build schools near the frontier because they will be filled with out-of-borough pupils, so school-free zones are being created artificially by the Greenwich judgment problem. There are also serious anomalies in funding, as the hon. Member for Croydon, Central (Geraint Davies) said in an earlier intervention. Often, the migrant population coming in from other boroughs has totally different characteristics from that of the host borough. It just happens that in my case in the Hampton area, the migrant population is a deprived population, which is funded at the level of the host borough, not at that of the migrating pupils.
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