CLAUSE 96.—(Power of the Minister to make grants in respect of aided schools and special agreement schools transferred to new sites or established in substitution for former schools.) (Hansard, 4 April 1944)

§ Mr. Ede
I beg to move, in page 68, line 13, after "them," to insert: or, as the case may be, by the managers or governors of the discontinued school or schools. We are dealing in this Sub-section with schools which are being erected, in certain circumstances, in place of transferred or substituted schools. Therefore, in calculating the money that will have had to be found if these children had been taught in their old schools, it is necessary to take into account not merely the expenditure by the existing managers, but the expenditure that will have been incurred by the managers in the schools from which they have come. It is therefore, necessary, from the point of view of drafting, to put in the words of the Amendment.

§ Mr. Ede
I beg to move, in page 68, line 15, at the end, to insert: (2) Where the Minister has approved proposals submitted to him under sub-section (2) of section twelve of this Act that any school proposed to be established should be maintained by a local education authority as an auxiliary school and has directed that the proposed school shall be an aided school or a special agreement school, then, if the Minister is satisfied that the proposed school is required for the purpose of providing education for pupils for whose education provision would otherwise have been made in another school which is for the time being an aided school or a special agreement school, the Minister may pay to the managers or governors of the proposed school a grant not exceeding one half of that part of the amount expended in the construction thereof as is, in his opinion, attributable to the provision of education for those pupils at that school. (3). 1923 In dealing with substituted schools it might on many occasions be unwise to limit the new school to the actual number of pupils who came from the old school, because the multiplication of a number of schools is not always desirable. Let us assume, for instance, that there is a need in a certain area, after a regrouping of the population has taken place, for a school for 600 children, only 200 of whom come from a transferred or substituted school. It would be unwise and uneconomical to have one school for 200 and another for 400. It is desirable that there should be one school for 600, and it would obviously be wrong that grants should be paid by the Minister on the basis of a school for 600. He has to pay only on the basis of a school for 200, for the children of which, under Clause 15, he has made himself responsible. The Amendment enables him to pay in proportion to the number of children who ought to be brought into the arrangement. In the case I have just given, he would pay one-third of the cost of erecting the new school because one-third of the pupils have come from the transferred or substituted school.

§ Mr. Hughes
If only one-third of the pupils came from the old school and the grant was upon the basis of that, only one-sixth would be paid by the Minister.

§ Mr. Ede
My hon. and learned Friend is right in his vulgar fraction and I did not put the case quite properly. The Minister is responsible only for grants in respect of one-third of the children, and as he pays not exceeding 50 per cent., the maximum grant he can make in such circumstances is one equivalent to one-sixth of the cost of the school. Suppose a schools costs £60,000, one-third would be £20,000, and the grant on that would be not exceeding £10,000. It is clearly desirable that such an arrangement should be made because it will enable both building and staffing to be carried on on as economical a basis as possible, especially during a period when economy in both these services will be desirable.

§ Mr. Hughes
The Committee will agree with the general tenour of the Parliamentary Secretary's proposal, but there may be in the examples he gave an unfortunate implication, which he might perhaps correct. It ought not to go out 1924 from the Committee that if an aided school, taking advantage of Clause 16, is transferred elsewhere, and when it is transferred finds that it has only a small proportion of the child population which needs to be catered for, it will get the right, provided it finds the money for the aided school, to be the school for a much larger number of the child population than it was in the place from which it came. The example used by my hon. Friend was a transfer of 200 children to a place where education was required for 600. Assuming 600 to be the economic size of school, it would be unfortunate if it went out that the transfer of 200 children to another place automatically gave the school, provided it could find the money, to have the aided school covering a much larger population.

§ Mr. Ede
I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend. Clearly there must be a case for the erection of an aided school of the required size. Transferring a nucleus does not give a prescriptive right to the transferred school to have a larger number than that which it took out. The kind of case I instanced might arise on big housing estates, and we would not desire the unnecessary multiplication of small or medium sized schools.