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Lord Marlesford: My Lords, I am listening with enormous interest to my noble friend. Does he agree that many of the measures he is putting forward as a means of limiting social security fraud could be more easily dealt with if there were to be one national identity number rather than the use of names? Once they have the right number one can at least ensure that one does not have a multiplicity of applications from the same people.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: My Lords, my noble friend invites me to go on a slightly different tack. I know that he is interested in this, but all that I shall say to him is that if you are to base a system on national insurance numbers or national identity numbers you have to be jolly sure that you have created a system which ensures the security of those numbers. If they are not totally secure, fraud could be made easier. One must be cautious about assuming that a national identity card will necessarily mean that fraud, especially organised fraud, can be avoided.
I remind the House that we are talking about serious, multiple-identity fraud involving both income support and housing benefit. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, that we take housing benefit fraud very seriously because such fraud can be large scale and organised. Someone was recently sentenced to five years' imprisonment for fiddling considerable sums of money from us. He had claimed incapacity benefit and, under a number of different guises, had managed to persuade doctors that he was schizophrenic and suffered from stress and nervous disorders. He was also claiming unemployment benefit in other guises. He had set up 15 false identities in order to claim benefit. Another chap was an asylum seeker--whether bogus or not has not yet been finally determined--but the one sure thing is that he had set up four bogus identities under which to claim various benefits. Fraud is a problem with all
benefits. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, rightly pointed out, housing benefit is a fertile area for such organised crime.I was pleased to hear the noble Baroness coming to the decision that housing benefit fraud is a real problem. Back in 1993 Mr. Keith Bradley said in the other place that the Government had overestimated the level of benefit fraud and that there was some danger of overstating the amount of fraud in the system. In that debate, on 16th July 1993, Mr. Bradley also said that we were expecting local authorities to achieve targets that were far too high. He said that,
- "the recovery targets set for local authorities are unrealistically high. I know that there is a lower level and a higher level, but my investigations across the country convince me that many local authorities find it extremely difficult to hit even the lower targets ... the Government have set the targets unrealistically high".--[Official Report, Commons, 16/7/93; col. 1256-7.]
Clearly, that is another U-turn by the Opposition on their road to the manifesto. Just two or three years ago they said that we were hugely overestimating the size of housing benefit fraud. I am now told we are hugely underestimating it. What we are doing is treating such fraud very seriously. We have laid down what we believe are realistic and challenging targets. In 1993-94 the savings amounted to £92 million. They had increased to £224 million in 1995-96 and are projected to rise to £260 million this year. We provide practical encouragement to authorities in anti-fraud work by providing financial incentives and allowing them to share in the savings they achieve.
I have already mentioned the introduction of a national housing benefit datamatching service which we are going to implement along with other data changes relating to the way in which we use information technology. We are starting a pilot project in December run by the local authorities to target organised fraud, including landlord fraud, across the London boroughs. London has a bad reputation simply because there are so many housing authorities cheek by jowl and the same people can set up scams in one borough, do the same thing in the adjacent borough, and if the two computers do not talk to each other they can never be found out. That is an important aspect which we, and the local authorities, must tackle. There is also a new challenge fund. Local authorities can bid for money in order to implement anti-fraud initiatives of their own. There is a project to research, develop and pilot a range of key verification measures to improve and standardise the checks made by local authorities to help to ensure that fraudulent claims do not enter their system on the housing benefit side--and that they do not enter our system on the income support side. There is a lot of work that we can do together. I believe that with IT we have some powerful new tools in the fight against organised landlord fraud and against landlord and tenant fraud.
In conclusion, benefit fraud is a criminal activity. We are determined to stamp it out. I am pleased that I have the support of the whole House in our endeavours. In the past financial year £1.4 billion of fraud was detected and 400,000 fraudsters were caught. As my noble friend
Lord Rotherwick said, 10,000 fraudsters were prosecuted with a 99 per cent. conviction rate. I have outlined the wide range of measures that we have taken, and are taking, to deal with this difficult issue. We identify fraud against social security as a major problem. We have declared war on fraudsters. We are attacking fraud on all fronts. I believe that we are winning because we are willing to tackle it as hard as we possibly can. Our message is clear: there is no future in fraud. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hayhoe for initiating the debate and to my two noble friends for their maiden speeches. I am grateful also to all other noble Lords who have spoken for their support in this battle which I believe we can win.4.45 p.m.
Lord Hayhoe: My Lords, we have had a useful and well-informed short debate. I thank the Minister for his detailed reply. I thank also the select band who have spoken, including of course the two maiden speakers from whom we hope to hear again soon.
As was acknowledged by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, I tried to avoid controversy in opening the debate. I am glad that the general mood was consensual. It is good when the House is like that. Perhaps inevitably--certainly not unexpectedly--a note of some controversy entered the speech from the Opposition Front Bench, but why should the habits of a lifetime be changed? One accepted that that was quite liable to happen.
However, one clear message has surely come from the debate: benefit fraud is theft. It is wrong. It is abhorrent. It is inexcusable and it is unacceptable. More than that, prevention is better than detection. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.
Educational Choice
4.47 p.m.
Baroness Perry of Southwark rose to call attention to the importance of choice and diversity in the education of four to 19 year-olds; and to move for Papers.
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to debate some of the most important aspects of the educational landscape. It would be easy in the light of the current press preoccupations to do nothing today but deplore the state of our schools, the crisis in discipline and the poor performance of teachers with more and more gloom until we had talked ourselves into a state of collective despair. I do not believe that that would be helpful to teachers or to pupils--nor would it address issues about which we in this House are most concerned.
I spent 17 years visiting schools and colleges as a member of Her Majesty's Inspectorate. As chief inspector I read my colleagues' reports of the hundreds of school and college visits that they made each year. Since then, although working in higher education I have been privileged to visit schools and to talk regularly
with teachers and heads in their schools, in private and in conferences. I therefore have good evidence when I say that the overwhelming majority of our schools are well ordered industrious institutions with good relationships between teachers and pupils and with good standards being achieved. In our justifiable anger at those examples where teachers are failing either to maintain discipline or to teach the basic skills to an acceptable standard, we should remember that the bad examples are far outnumbered by the good.We have long known that there were problems with a minority of schools and a minority of teachers. The difficulty is in knowing how to tackle the many different influences which bear on those problems. Issues such as the training of teachers, the content of the curriculum, the structure of examinations, increased autonomy for schools and the training of head teachers have all been tackled by the Government in the past few years. But even more fundamental than those is the relationship between parents and schools and the concerns that we all share about examples where the basic trust between the two seems to have broken down. It is for that reason that the Government's initiatives in the past decade have been designed to ensure that parents and pupils are at the heart of all educational policies.
If schools are to serve the needs of their pupils adequately and to meet the aspirations of parents they must establish a real partnership with parents from the start so that parents feel in every sense a real commitment to the school and to the job that it is doing. This commitment, however, is immeasurably stronger if there has been a conscious choice on the part of parents to send their children to a particular school and if there is adequate information on which the parents can base what is, after all, one of the most important choices they have to make for their children. This is why so much of the Government's recent policy has been directed towards ensuring that parents have a very full range of information about the schools within their neighbourhood. Every school must now publish a yearly prospectus which describes both its achievements and what it has to offer. The prospectus includes examination and key stage test results, comparing them with local and national results. It also lets parents know about the standards of discipline within the schools because it records the rates of unauthorised absence or truanting. For secondary schools, the prospectus will record the jobs or further education which school leavers have pursued.
Parents will also find a description of the school's aims, the values it hopes to give the pupils in its care, the moral and spiritual guidance which it offers and how it deals with children who have special needs arising from exceptional gifts or exceptional learning difficulties. In addition to the very full information via the school prospectus, parents now receive reports from the Office for Standards in Education, which inspects the schools at regular intervals. These Ofsted reports, as we know from the press, are of intense interest to parents and employers.
The Government have made this information available because they recognise that a full knowledge of the ethos and performance of the school is the first
step towards enabling parents to make a real and informed choice about the right school for their child. Once they have made that choice, it is vital for the school to engage the parents as true partners in the learning, discipline and moral values of their children. The knowledge and concern which parents naturally have for their child is an enormous resource for the school, and the pilot projects in home-school partnership, involving parents as intelligent supervisors of their children's homework and other activities, are much to be welcomed.We have come a very long way in recent years towards meeting the goal which the Prime Minister set in 1991 to empower parents within the education system so that they can make better informed choices about what is best for their children. But the parents' right to choose means choosing the school which suits their child and their family. No parent wishes to see a child fitting into some predetermined mould which ignores the very special ability and needs of the individual child. Under the Parents' Charter, parents have a right to expect every school to do its best to make sure that every child does as well as he or she possibly can. This is a very demanding standard, but it is the least that parents have the right to expect. It is demanding also in that it requires a very wide range of schools from which parents can choose and a very wide range of opportunities within those schools. The individual needs of children cannot be met within a uniform comprehensive system.
As pupils get older they increasingly need to make choices for themselves and they need information and guidance in reaching the right choice of a future career or programme study. For this reason, I very much welcome the provisions in the Bill now being considered in another place which are designed to ensure that pupils receive adequate careers education and advice with access to information about career and educational opportunities after they leave school. The importance of such information and advice cannot be over-estimated. All the best efforts in the world in providing a good education and raising achievement are diminished if, at the end of the educational experience, pupils cannot apply the knowledge and skills which they have acquired to their adult working lives.
At the age of 14 and again at 16 young people now have a range of choices which they may make within the school curriculum. They are still guaranteed, of course, access to the breadth and balance of the national curriculum, but in addition they now have options in specialist fields such as languages, the performing arts, humanities and technology. The introduction of the GNVQ (the general national vocational qualification) has further extended the range of choices which are available to this age group. It is now possible for them to combine academic study with a qualification which introduces them to basic understandings in a broad career field.
The move towards parity of esteem between vocational and academic education has been one of the most important developments of the past decade. Young people and their parents are able to make choices about an appropriate and attractive future career, no longer
hindered as they were before by issues of status and dreaded academic snobbery. Too often in past years young people were forced into academic choices where they under-performed and were unhappy instead of choosing broad vocational courses where they could have excelled. The policies of the past decade have provided us with a range of diverse institutions representing nothing short of a revolutionary change in the former all-too-uniform landscape of education.Successive legislation has given increasing levels of independence to schools at the individual institutional level, extending their financial freedom to a freedom to specialise in specific areas of the school curriculum in which they have a special contribution to offer. In the new Education Bill, the Government have proposed that schools may select a larger percentage of their pupils, choosing their own selection criteria. These criteria enable a school to select young people with a special talent, perhaps in the performing arts, languages, technology or humanities, or even in sport. Comprehensive schools selected only on the basis of geography and neighbourhood--this element of selection allows a mix of social backgrounds, sharing talents and aptitudes instead of class. Furthermore, the parent of the secondary school child has a choice between schools still within the LEA system, Church schools, grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges as well as schools in the independent sector. Thanks to the provision of assisted places, whose number is to double to 68,000 following on the Prime Minister's announcement last year, access to the independent sector is no longer limited to those whose parents have the ability to pay. The popularity of this scheme among parents is annually demonstrated by the numbers who apply and the scheme has ensured that the independent schools have a wider mix of social backgrounds among their pupils. It also, of course, provides access to education of a very high standard indeed to those who could not otherwise have exercised such a choice.
This diverse range of schools for 11 to 16 year-olds is matched by the very wide range of choices available for 16 to 19 year-olds. A 16 year-old can now choose the type of further education and training best suited to his individual interests as well as to his individual abilities. If he chooses to remain in the sixth form he may choose A-levels or GNVQs, thus ensuring that the option for a vocational as well as an academic route is kept open. Increasingly, many are choosing to move into one of the dynamic further education colleges to which this Government have also given financial autonomy and entrepreneurial freedom. Because of this, these colleges now provide courses which match the needs of students and employers, unchannelled by any form of LEA planning. The popularity and success of these programmes for 16 to 19 year-olds is dramatically demonstrated by the increase in the number of them who now stay on in education after the age of 16. In the five years from 1987-88 to 1992-93, the proportion of 16 year-olds in full-time education rose from 48 per cent. to 71 per cent. and the Government propose an additional 25 per cent. increase in the
numbers in further education and are well on target. Modern apprenticeships and national vocational qualifications have, since their introduction, provided work-based opportunities for a wide section of that age group and have ensured that young people move into a properly gradated and externally monitored system of training when they enter the work place.The record of the city technology colleges founded by private sector investment has been a very proud one indeed. Located in some of the most deprived inner city areas of the United Kingdom, the CTCs have succeeded in raising the performance and standards of those young people; have provided them with expert teaching in well-ordered and pleasant buildings; and given them a sense of their own dignity which has been heartening to observe. The commitment and faith of those who have founded such CTCs--and my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham is an outstanding example of a benefactor and proprietor of two such colleges--has brought a new element into public sector education in this country for the first time since the days of the great humanitarians of the 19th century.
The diversity of schools and the diversity of institutions at all levels, which has been made possible by the increasing autonomy which this Government have given them, has produced a healthy competition among the schools and colleges. That competition has provided them with a motivation towards excellence and has developed in schools a will to meet the needs and aspirations of all pupils and parents in a way in which very few other measures have been able to do in the past.
Parents now not only exercise choice but exercise real influence over the nature and content of the school curriculum. Of course there are many matters which are still not right in the education system and much work still needs to be done. Reforms in teacher training were initiated in 1983 and continue today. Reforms of examinations and curricula have gone a long way to raise standards and to increase choice. The introduction of an orderly system of national vocational qualifications led by employers and responsive to their needs has done much to make this country more competitive in the international market.
The autonomy of institutions has enabled them to meet the needs of their clients in a flexible way. The healthy competition in which they now engage has directed their attention towards raising their performance, so ensuring that pupils and students really do have the opportunity to perform as well as they possibly can, just as the Parent's Charter promised.
Better careers guidance and parity of esteem between vocational and academic work has encouraged more young people to choose a vocational rather than an academic route and both they and their future employers have benefited from that choice. Everything in education takes a long time to bear fruit and we cannot expect the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s to bear immediate fruit. But the first signs are there. Massively increased participation in post-compulsory education and a steady increase in pupil achievement are a validation of the Government reforms. The teaching profession and the
talented people who run our schools and colleges have responded magnificently to the challenges which those changes have laid upon them. I have every confidence that the exercise of parental and student choice among an increasingly wide diversity of institutions matching the needs of young people and of society is working towards an education system of which we in this country will become ever more proud. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.5.3 p.m.
Lord Morris of Castle Morris: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for giving us this opportunity to debate the importance of the concept of choice and diversity in the education of four to 19 year-olds. I hope the House will pardon me if my own small contribution is rather unusual. I would like to offer a few thoughts on only one word. I will be short, superficial and serious.
I must confess that I have never been entirely easy with the overarching importance which the party opposite seems to give in the vocabulary of education to that idea of choice. I remember watching Mrs. Thatcher as she then was after one or other of the Conservative Party's election victories--I cannot remember which--addressing the workers at Conservative Central Office and congratulating them, and then exhorting them to new and further efforts and saying, "We must give them more choices". The implication seemed to be that choice is, in itself, an ultimate good, and the more choices one has the better one's life will be.
If I beg leave to doubt its supreme moral value, it is perhaps because I have never been convinced of the ultimate importance of consumerism. I once walked into a vast supermarket in Washington DC in search of a packet of cornflakes. I was confronted with a great aisle marked "cereals" which stretched away into the middle distance, and I was obliged to inspect something like 50 to 60 different brands, styles, combinations and varieties of cereal products.
I felt I had vastly more choice than I either needed or wanted, and if I had been able only to select between three or four really high quality products, that would have been enough. In the world of cornflakes, then, so far as I am concerned, more does not necessarily mean better. It may similarly be so in the realm of education. More schools do not necessarily mean better schools. More different schools do not necessarily mean better education unless they, in their differences, are equally good. Wide parental choice is not necessarily good if parents are ill-informed, careless or do not want it. More choice among available schools is not necessarily the most important choice a parent must make for the child. Staying at home and teaching the child to read, setting its imagination alight in a one-to-one parental teaching relationship may be even more important.
In any case, the concept of choice is not simple and transpicuous, especially as applied to a realm so complex and dynamic as education. Rational choice theory is, I am informed, an area of study which currently interests some economists, and is worth deeper
exploration. But it begins with the axiom that rational choice is only possible if two conditions are satisfied: first, if all consumers have perfect knowledge; and, secondly, if all consumers possess the means to achieve their choice. It is manifestly true that both conditions fail for most of our population in the matter of choosing a school for a child.In the world of contemporary education, however, it is necessary first to ask the question: choice for whom? I take it that we would all agree that just as Sainsbury's, Tesco, Safeway and the like are the providers of cornflakes, so the providers of education are the state, which provides a variety of schools, and the private or independent sector, including the Churches, and philosophical groups like the Steiner schools and the Montessori schools. The "consumers" of schools--to use the hideous jargon--can be only the children and to some extent the parents, and the exercisers of choice can be only the children, the parents and the schools themselves.
If this be granted, it is immediately obvious that the children themselves have very little choice indeed. In nursery and primary education they will normally go where their parents send them and that first choice will have a strong determining influence on where their secondary and tertiary education takes place. If your parents send you to Sunningdale or the Dragon School you are likely to go on to a school in the independent section and thereafter, with comparative ease, to a university, quite possibly one of the older and more prestigious of those institutions.
The fallacy which needs to be exposed, however, resides in the next category--the parents. If I have £5 in my pocket and I go to the supermarket, I have the absolutely free and unfettered choice to select whichever packet of cornflakes I like provided that the cost of that packet is not more than £5. It is not so with education. Be parents never so rich, never so powerful, they do not have an unfettered choice among the available schools because the schools themselves have the right to refuse a place to any child without giving any reason. You can be refused by Winchester: you cannot be refused by Weetabix.
Neither is the unfettered choice the privilege and prerogative of the schools themselves. Parents can only apply--they cannot choose--and schools can reject an application for any reason they like, but boarding schools have to fill their beds and the comprehensive school has to fill its available places or else they are on the slippery slope to failure.
So the concept of choice in education is not singular: it depends on who is choosing, and between what. Children have initially small, but gradually increasing, powers of choice as they grow older; independent schools have wide powers of choice, limited by quantity and quality of applications and the need to break even financially; maintained schools have in the past had virtually no choice (you take what you get), but some are now offered some choice of pupils on grounds of ability. That is good for them but bad for the other schools to which the rejected must go. Parents have always had one choice at least--between a state school
and an independent school--if their income was sufficient to make that choice meaningful, and it has been the policy of the present Government to increase the choices of school available to parents.But is this increase in choice of schools what parents want? Is it their highest priority? What evidence can be adduced that they place choice first? They may, but I beg leave to present one fact which calls the possibility at least into question. Parents already have some choices but, according to DfEE statistics, in 1994, the latest date for which such statistics can be provided, 89.3 per cent. of all pupils were in comprehensive schools. Most of those must have been in their local comprehensive school.
What most parents seem to consider most important, then, is a school firmly established in their own community, close to home, which cares for each child, establishes good standards of behaviour and gets good, acceptable academic results. Parents seem to want high-quality schools more than they want choices among schools.
The wisdom of the tribe is frequently displayed in its proverbs. Perhaps I may remind your Lordships of one English proverb, first recorded in 1594 in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (Act I, Scene I, line 135). Your Lordships may care to look it up in by far the finest edition of that play in the Arden Shakespeare; I forbear to say who edited it. That proverb says,
- "there is small choice in rotten apples".
5.13 p.m.
The Earl of Sandwich: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for giving me this opportunity to speak and for introducing the debate. I should like to speak in favour of greater diversity in the schools curriculum, with reference to the moral debate and to the growing interest in global awareness, or development education. I believe that our children's understanding of world affairs has become more and not less urgent. I feel that the time has come for greater recognition of this in school inspections and in the next curricular review.
This is already an acknowledged area of formal education, recognised at various levels and in several subject areas such as geography, history, modern languages, English and drama and of course religious education. It crops up in cross-curricular themes such as citizenship and environmental education. Above all, it is popular with teachers and with pupils and apparently even with Ofsted, though it has yet to be fully identified within the formal curriculum. For those less familiar with it, the Development Education Association publishes valuable guidelines for teachers and there is a special supplement in this week's The Times Educational Supplement.
For obvious reasons there is a lot of interest in this subject within the aid lobby. In the last week alone three conferences involving teachers, local authorities and aid agency staff have been held in London on this subject, addressed either by the Minister for Overseas
Development, the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, or by the new Shadow Overseas Development Minister, Clare Short.The British Council, through its Central Bureau, the BBC through BBC Education and the DfEE itself are also interested parties, although I wish they had more opportunities to demonstrate it. There is a strictly educational reason for this interest. Development education is an ideal vehicle for the SMSC (the spiritual, moral, social and cultural) development of pupils which is already a clear requirement of the curriculum. The study of international affairs, human rights, social justice, conflict resolution and citizenship all present immediate examples of good and evil in the world today. Of course, I accept, following yesterday's important debate of the noble Earl, Lord Longford, on moral education, that knowledge of the Gospels, and the story of the Good Samaritan in particular, may seem sufficient. But such is today's outpouring of international news that children today need more interpretation of world events which may not be available to them at home. Such is the cultural diversity within this country, and the expertise within the aid agencies, that we already have the resources with which to inform and guide this interpretation.
The recent initiatives of Frances Lawrence, the report of the values forum of the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority and Nick Tate's proposal to introduce "critical thinking" on moral values, all fit in with the need to bring development education into the mainstream of educational inspection and assessment.
I do not under-estimate the problems. One has been of definition--the ability of Ofsted to measure performance in development education. The difficulty here is not lack of interest, but priorities. The inspectors' workload is enormous, and they are now being asked to refine their reporting and keep to the main issues. They cannot be expected to know how much development education is already going on in schools, unless the schools themselves inform them.
However, there are encouraging signs that inspectors do like to demonstrate the kinds of initiative which go with global perspectives. Perhaps I may give your Lordships one example. A west country school recently impressed the inspectors with a Caribbean theme which included a visit to Brixton. It was the first time that those children had had any direct experience of another culture. Many teachers have their own experience of working abroad in other societies or in overseas partnerships and they can use these in many contexts in the school.
Money, of course, comes into it--for materials, teacher training and manpower. The Overseas Development Administration believes that development education is important, not least to advertise the UK's aid programme and the ODA's own services to schools. But it cannot, as an agency for aid, spend a very high proportion of its reduced budget in the UK. The European Union, to its great credit, has taken up a lot of the slack and has directly assisted a lot of regional initiatives to help teachers. The aid agencies do a lot, though they have had to cut back many of their programmes in the past two years.
The Labour Party promises to do more through a development education council. I believe that the DfEE, in its various disguises, is well disposed to development education. It would be comforting to hear the Minister confirm that in his reply. A lot of progress has, for example, been made in the area of environmental education.
In summary, I believe that schools, informed by the non-governmental organisations and their local communities, have shown the potential to develop materials and to deliver education on many international issues which could be more widely shared at various levels of education. This Government still have an opportunity to assist that process in the next curricular review if they really believe in it. The evidence is that schools are now taking it on, but acceptance often depends on the ingenuity of teachers rather than the system, which can sometimes appear to work against them and against diversity in education.
I look forward to hearing the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Young, on this subject as we have worked together. I am sure that she shares many of the opinions I have expressed.
5.20 p.m.
Baroness Young: My Lords, I, too, wish to start by thanking my noble friend Lady Perry for introducing this debate today. She has chosen a most important subject. I believe that education is top of the political agenda in this country. I begin my remarks by referring to a matter which she mentioned; namely, the completely untrue belief held by some that much of the education system is in a state of collapse. I pay tribute to the overwhelming majority of teachers who do a good job in our schools, often in difficult circumstances, and who deserve our support.
It will no doubt be much to the surprise of the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, when I say how much I enjoyed his speech. Of course, I always enjoy his speeches. First, I love his Welsh accent which does us all so much good and carries us along. One sometimes wishes he would put his words into verse. I must certainly look at the version of the works of Shakespeare which he edited so that I, too, can mention a few quotes the next time I speak. I particularly enjoyed his speech this afternoon because it is so unusual to hear the ideas of "old" Labour. I began to wonder whether I was hearing him correctly. The noble Lord was in effect using the argument that because everyone cannot have choice, no one should have any choice. He should speak to one or two of his colleagues on the Opposition Front Bench--I would not dream of naming names--who do not seem to take quite the same view of that matter. They put choice in education top of their agenda. In effect the noble Lord was saying--this was believed just two years ago--that there was no more need to choose where to send one's child to be educated than to choose where to post a letter.
I think that choice is important. One may make a joke of it, but it is a serious matter. Its importance for parents and pupils cannot be over-emphasised. Choice has raised standards and it is raising standards. However, as
my noble friend quite rightly said, that takes a long time. It has been a case of choice backed by information. I do not think any government have ever provided parents with as much information about schools as have the present Government. I recall that when I was an education Minister the first Bill that we put through in 1980 required information to be given to parents about schools and required schools to publish information about themselves. They are now required to publish information about their curriculum, their examinations, their pastoral care and other matters because if one is to exercise choice it must be informed choice. I believe that one of the reasons that we now have this welcome figure--I am sure we are all agreed on that--of 71 per cent. of the school population staying on beyond the compulsory leaving age is that there is such a wide variety of schools for pupils to attend. My noble friend Lady Perry touched on that matter.As regards grant-maintained schools, there are now over 1,000 educating some 600,000 pupils. The number would be considerably higher if so many schools had not been discouraged from adopting grant-maintained status at the ballot stage by those who should know better. There are 15 city technology colleges and 30 language colleges. There are 151 technology colleges. The results are available for all to see. Ofsted's annual report produced earlier this year showed that just over 900 secondary schools were inspected. Over 20 per cent. of those were grant maintained, but of the 32 that were identified as outstandingly successful schools, 13, or 41 per cent., were grant maintained. In the list of 70 good and improving schools, 31 per cent. were grant maintained. The fact that those results have been achieved is a measure of the success and the help that is being given to pupils. I wish to emphasise how important it is to have GNVQs alongside A levels. It is extremely important that we should achieve the highest possible standards in vocational education.
In the time that remains to me I wish to touch on what I consider to be an important aspect of the diversity that we have given to parents and pupils; namely, the assisted places scheme. That scheme is popular with parents and with pupils. I am pleased that it is to be extended in the new education Bill to come before Parliament. The assisted places scheme provides a much wider choice. In 1995-96, 42 per cent. of all free places were given to families whose gross incomes were less than some £9,500 a year. Some 60 per cent. of the places were allocated to pupils from families whose incomes were less than £13,000 a year.
Pupils in assisted places schemes have done extraordinarily well in public examinations. In 1995 the pass rate of assisted places pupils in public examinations was over 94 per cent. at both GCSE and A level, which is better than that achieved in independent schools generally, or indeed in maintained schools. Some 51 per cent. of assisted places pupils achieved either an A or a B grade at A level, and 77 per cent. achieved either an A or a B grade at GCSE level. Some 90 per cent. went on to higher education. Some research has been produced recently on the advantages of an assisted places scheme. That research shows that assisted places pupils were entered for significantly more A and
AS levels than their counterparts in the maintained sector. As measured in the annual performance tables published by the DfEE, the overall benefit for assisted places pupils was an average of between 3.2 and 6.2 points. When one translates that into grades, one finds that the overall advantage for assisted places pupils amounted to between one-and-a-half and three A level grades over all subjects taken. It is well known that for many sixth formers two or three grades at A level constitute the difference between acceptance and rejection for a popular course at one of the more sought after universities. That is quite a remarkable achievement.I am quite certain that someone will say, "Ah, but of course it costs so much more to provide an assisted place than one in a maintained school". However, that is not the case. The average net cost to the state of an assisted places pupil in 1995-96 was £3,700. The standard spending assessment for local education authorities for pupils under the age of 16 in secondary schools is £2,600, and for those over the age of 16--that is, those in the sixth form--it is £3,600. The comparison of costs is not exact as maintained school pupil costs do not include either capital costs or administrative costs, whereas in the case of independent schools those costs are included. When one takes that factor into account, there is barely any difference at all between the cost of an assisted places pupil and the cost of a pupil in a maintained secondary school. That is relevant to the important debate about the amount of money which might be saved if the assisted places scheme were ended. My figures show that at the end of the day no money would be saved by that course of action, and the only people who would suffer would be the children themselves. It is also claimed that the assisted places scheme results in the brightest pupils being "creamed off" and leaving the maintained system. In fact only 1 per cent. of the pupils in any age group are assisted places pupils. Therefore the argument hardly stands up to analysis. But even if it were true, one has to ask whether it is right to sacrifice the child for the sake of the school. I think that it is not. The scheme has given to many pupils a benefit which otherwise they would never have had. It not only benefits the pupils but the country as a whole when those pupils are qualified.
I believe that it is a remarkable scheme. I am glad that it will be extended. I wish that it could be further extended because it is a scheme that many parents want. The scheme is for the benefit of pupils and not of schools.
It is very sad that the one certain pledge of the Labour Party for the next election is that it would phase out the scheme, but such a course would just damage the opportunities for many pupils. I am sorry that the Liberal Democrats are so uncertain about the issue. So far as I can see--I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Walliswood, will correct me if I am wrong--the Liberal Democrats have said that they will end the scheme and replace it with something from central or local government. However, as I have seen no
details I do not know what they would do. It would be helpful if the noble Baroness would explain their position to us.This is one of the most important aspects of the argument about diversity. However, I do not refer only to assisted places. I wish to speak in some detail; this is a matter of important public policy. The assisted places scheme was introduced because the last Labour Government removed the direct grant from a number of the best schools in the country--schools that were the backbone providers of scientists in this country. In removing that grant, ironically, at a stroke, the Labour Government managed to create more independent schools than any other government. I am sure that that was not intended, but it was what occurred. The assisted places scheme was brought in to make up for that loss.
I wish to commend what the Government have done. I hope that the scheme will be increased for the benefit of all.
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