HC Deb 09 November 1959 vol 613 cc162-72

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Bryan.]

10.1 p.m.

Mr. Bernard Braine (Essex, South-East)

I am most grateful for having been given the opportunity to raise a matter tonight which touches on the interests of a very large number of my constituents. It is my purpose to draw attention to two matters: first, the serious lack of provision for secondary education in Rochford; and, secondly, the inadequacy of present proposals to remedy that situation in the future.

I do this with some regret because the Essex local education authority has a justifiable reputation. It can point with pride to the large number of new schools completed since the end of the war, schools which are well designed, well equipped and well staffed. Indeed, I would say that at Thundersley in my constituency there is one of the finest secondary modern schools in the country. But at Rochford, unfortunately, we have a secondary school operating under such conditions—I shall not mince my words—that more than 600 children are not receiving a secondary education at all, and unless something is done quickly they will not receive a proper secondary education for some time to come.

Part of the problem arises from the quite phenomenal expansion of population in the south-east corner of Essex. Hon. Members will recall that since 1945 there have been three constituency redistributions in this area. My own electorate increased by 25 per cent. during the lifetime of the last Parliament. In fact, since 1945, the population in the south-east corner of the county has doubled, and the school population has more than doubled. Yet the provision of new school places has consistently lagged behind the increase in population. Where there are changes in the pattern of the population that is not unusual, but my constituents feel that the provision lags much further behind in south-east Essex than elsewhere in the country and further behind than is necessary. They are justified, in my view, since they see that next door in the neighbouring new town of Basildon and in new municipal development elsewhere in the county the authority is making adequate provision in advance of the new population coming in.

My constituents consider that the authority has failed signally to appreciate the quite exceptional rate of private building development which is taking place in our area. In fact, I think I may claim that it is the highest rate of private building development in the country. This complaint is true not only of Rochford but of places like Rayleigh and Canvey Island. For the education authority has failed consistently to take account of the fact that a large number of young families with children approaching school age are moving into these districts.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that against this background the Rochford secondary school should have been overcrowded for a long time. In fact it has been using overflow halls for the last six years. Moreover, the number of school children is increasing all the time. It increased in September; it will increase next September. An easement of this unhappy situation might have been obtained but for the fact that the main school is within 800 yards of the north-east—south-west runway of Southend Airport. This means that the school is within what the Ministry of Aviation calls the approach funnel to the airport or the public safety zone. It means also that every fifteen minutes of the school's working day an aircraft takes off or comes in directly over the school building, making teaching difficult and sometimes intolerable for both staff and pupils. I know this myself, because I have attempted to speak in the school at such a time with aircraft overhead.

This situation will worsen, because the number of plane movements in and out of the airport in 1957 was 18,739, last year it was 22,500, and next year I understand it will be in the region of 25,000. Thus the nuisance will rapidly worsen. One would have thought that all this would have been foreseen, since the airport has not just suddenly started to expand. But by some strange myopia the local education authority failed to foresee what would happen and—I am sorry to say this to my hon. Friend—the previous Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education did not know that noise was a factor to be taken into account until I told him about it last August.

Provision had been made for the expansion of the school in 1958. Then came the first blow. I quote from a letter from my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation which I received last July, in which he said: The Essex County Education Committee consulted us in 1958 about a proposed extension of the Rochford County Secondary School. In our view the approach to a busy runway is a most inappropriate place for school development involving, as it does, a high concentration of children in a small area. We, therefore, felt bound to advise against extending the school within the Public Safety Zone. Everything then came to a standstill. Since then the authority has merely tinkered with the problem. When it finally settled on a site for a new building, the proposal was for a two-form entry school only. That would have meant the ridiculous situation of having half the children and staff in a new building enjoying decent conditions while the other half remained in an area which everyone admits is both dangerous and noisy.

I say bluntly to my hon. Friend and the House that if airport expansion is necessary—and in these modern times it is—that price must be paid. At the moment the price is being paid by the children of my constituents. That is something we should not tolerate. The price clearly must be the provision of an entirely new school. On this, I assure my hon. Friend, the Divisional Education Executive, the Rochford Rural District Council, the school governors, many hundreds of parents in this area and I see absolutely eye to eye.

There is only one solution then, the provision of a new school. But the question does not end there. It is not only a matter of providing a new school, but providing it quickly for children who have already suffered from the delay in providing the additional accommodation which, but for the airport, they would have had by now. I have mentioned that throughout the period of frustration it has been necessary to use outside halls. That is a situation not unknown elsewhere, but elsewhere it is tolerable for a period of time provided that the headmaster can exercise effective control. That is not the position at Rochford. This question of control to ensure that a school has a distinct, corporate existence of its own where the headmaster and staff can exercise control over the school as a whole, is surely fundamental to education. My hon. Friend will know that the Ministry's own pamphlet The New Secondary Education, No. 9, proudly asserts on page 17 that: All secondary schools will have equal opportunities of fostering a healthy social life. Every pupil must be encouraged to form sound personal and social relationships. Through a school's normal day-to-day activities, whether in or out of school time, there must run a strong sense that it is a body of people living together, helping and learning from one another. Those equal opportunities do not obtain at Rochford. At the moment, one-third of the pupils are taught in outside halls. The first is the Oxford Social Club, and those taught in that hall get no instruction at all in the main school. They take little part in its extracurricular activities, and are isolated from the rest. They receive no practical instruction. Science lessons are restricted to those which need no equipment. There is no non-fiction or reference library.

As for the children accommodated at the British Legion Hall they have to vacate that place on Friday afternoons in order to allow the old-age pensioners to hold their weekly meeting. My hon. Friend will appreciate that it is precisely because these halls are used for other purposes that it is impossible to keep equipment in them or to display the children's handiwork. In such an environment a feeling of belonging to a school and a sense of pride in achievement, which the Ministry, in its publications, says are essential to a proper secondary education, cannot be developed. Is it any wonder that teachers are despondent and feel frustrated and that the numbers of them leaving the school are high?

It is not merely that teaching and control are made difficult because so many of the pupils are accommodated in outside halls. It is also a fact that the halls themselves are utterly unsuitable. The Congregational Church Hall, for example, has been used as a classroom since last January. It is quite unsuitable for adults, let alone children. How any education authority can permit children to use it passes my comprehension. It is like a slum school out of Dickens.

May I describe it to the House? The outside of the building is dirty and dilapidated and rubbish is piled against one wall. Inside, the atmosphere is dingy and miserable. There are no wall windows and lighting and ventilation come from frosted skylights. In the hot weather, during the summer, the atmosphere was indescribable, although I must say that now winter is approaching two electric fans have been installed. The playground is a dirt yard adjoining an undertaker's premises. Some fifty-five children, boys and girls, have the use of two water closets.

I am told that the Rochford Rural District Council has never approved planning permission being given for the use of this hall. The clerk told me only this morning that planning permission has never been granted under the Town and Country Planning Regulations, 1951. Although this hall has been in use since January, the authority was not consulted about planning permission until 26th August last.

The Essex County Council is not only a local education authority but is also a planning authority. Here it seems to me to be breaking the law. I want to know more about this. I do not expect the Minister to answer this question tonight, but I should like to know by what right this authority condemns our children to occupy a hall for which no local authority has yet given planning permission. Who authorised this? I beg my hon. Friend to send an inspector to this school tomorrow—not next week but tomorrow—to condemn the use of these miserable, squalid buildings as a school building.

I must tell the House frankly that the present proposals to meet this unhappy situation are quite inadequate. I understand that Ministerial approval has been given to the erection on the Oxford Club site of a new, two-form entry school. This would merely perpetuate the division of what ought to be one school. It merely nibbles at the problem. What is more—and the local education authority does not seem to be facing this eventuality—it creates a further problem because part of the proposals envisage taking over part of the Hawkwell Holt Primary School. This primary school is already overcrowded, for the same reasons as those which apply in the secondary school. Parents have told me that they are so concerned that their children, coming up to primary school age, will not get the education to enable them to qualify for grammar school entrance, that they are thinking of moving out of the district. In other words, this problem bedevils not only secondary education in Rochford but primary education also. Worse still, I understand that the land upon which the education authority proposes to erect the new but quite inadequate two-form entry school, has not yet been acquired. The negotiations for this land have been going on for a long time. Will my hon. Friend say something about what is holding them up.

The whole situation is so chaotic, is in such a muddle and is so obviously damaging to educational standards that I must ask the Minister to institute an immediate inquiry. In doing so, I must make it plain that nothing short of a drastic recasting of present plans will suffice. It seems to me—and this accords with the views of all those interested locally—that the minimum requirements are, first, the provision of a new four-form entry school capable of expansion to a six-form entry school later, and, secondly, the immediate erection of two demountable classrooms with adequate sanitary accommodation on a suitable site.

The attitude of the authority up to now has been that this is a serious problem but not capable of a quick solution. The National Association of Schoolmasters has been told, for example, by the authority: it is unreasonable to think that a quick solution can be found That is an attitude I reject utterly. I hope that the Minister, seeing how endangered educational standards are at Rochford, will reject it too, because if a solution is not found quickly quite clearly hundreds of children in my constituency are not going to have that educational opportunity which is their most precious right and which all of us in the House are passionately determined they should have. I am asking my hon. Friend tonight to treat this unhappy situation as one of exceptional urgency calling for quite exceptional measures.

10.12 p.m.

Dr. Horace King (Southampton, Itchen)

First, may I on behalf of the teaching profession welcome the Parliamentary Secretary to the Box and pledge its support to anything he does towards our advance to equality of education for our children. I congratulate the hon. Member for Essex, South-East (Mr. Braine) on the fight he has been waging for the last three months and for the fair and reasoned way in which he has put his case. Every local association is behind the hon. Member, including, I believe, in its heart of hearts the Essex County Council. Certainly the teaching profession is solidly behind him, and angrily behind him, and I think that they have the right to be angry.

The issue the hon. Gentleman put is a very simple one. As an experienced teacher of 28 years' practical teaching, I say that with 60 planes a day roaring over a school education is literally impossible. It is false economy to try to solve the problem by dividing it into two, by hanging on to that part of the school within the noise area—indeed, within the dangerous area. The Ministry and the local education authority concede that there will have to be a four-form entry school.

I join with the hon. Gentleman in urging the Parliamentary Secretary to bow to what I believe to be unanimous educational opinion in the area and give Rochford a new school and a whole school in a place where children can be properly educated. Teachers in the district are incensed and talk of withdrawing their labour. The Minister will not be able to keep them in a noise-shattered school and the children in Rochford will suffer not only the disability of noise, but will suffer from inadequate staffing.

I urge the Minister tonight to make his first appearance at the Box one on which he concedes the case which the hon. Gentleman has done a service to the children in his constituency by bringing to his notice.

10.14 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education (Mr. Kenneth Thompson)

I am most grateful to the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Dr. King) for the courteous way in which he added to what my hon. Friend the Member for Essex, South-East (Mr. Braine) said. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for allowing me to make my bow at the Box in circumstances of friendliness and tolerance which might not otherwise have been possible.

The developing education system in this country, not only in the part of the constituency with which we are mainly concerned tonight, but almost everywhere, is harassed by a great many difficulties. I do not think that any of them are easy to resolve. We are faced with the problem produced by the demand for higher standards, by growing numbers of children, and by conditions which are changing in a great many and often unpredictable ways.

However, I do not want either my hon. Friend or the House to lose sight of the fact that the resources that the country is willing and ready to commit to the education service are also growing—more money, quicker and more efficient building and, of course, the accretion of more and more teachers to the service. Even in Essex, the county of which we are speaking, we would be wrong to forget that the education authority has for some years been spending about £2½ million a year in attempting to meet its problems, and in the two years for whose planning we are now committed the education authority is to spend about £5¼ million.

These things vary, of course, in various parts of the country. In some places, needs and demands come more nearly together than they do in others—and, of course, wherever we look there is never enough. There never will be enough. Whatever we feel may be necessary in education, there will always be pressure on us to provide more than we are able to find at any given time in any given place. What we in the Ministry have to try to devise is the right use of what we have. We have the Ministry to give aid and guidance—without paternalism. We have local education authorities to give co-operation and effort. We need from the teachers patient work, and sometimes endurance under difficulties. And from the parents we need understanding, and sometimes tolerance of our inadequacies.

In the case that my hon. Friend has described we have all these various elements. I do not complain at all about the vehemence with which he presented his case—not a bit. I think that the divisional executive and the county education authority are quite right to draw attention to the changed conditions resulting both from the growth in the population in this area and the complications added to that problem by the growth in size and activity at the Airport. They are perfectly right.

I think that my hon. Friend is quite right to express here the views of parents who are affected by those two changes in the conditions, and I hope that the House will allow me to take this opportunity to say that I think that the teaching staff, both past and present, are to be commended for continuing to try to do their best under what we know to be difficult, and increasingly difficult conditions. They are right to speak of the frustrations that beset their efforts to give of their best in conditions like this.

We know that the conditions are unsatisfactory in three main important respects. First, we know that the buildings are inadequate for the present size of the classes attending the school. Second, we know that it is very difficult, and is bound to be very difficult, both for the teachers to teach and for the children to learn when there are these noisy aircraft frequently overhead. Third, we know that it is a complication that parents of children are harassed by what they think is a danger resulting from the position of this school.

Perhaps the House will allow me to deal with the last of those considerations first. I do not think that we are wise either to exaggerate or to minimise the danger of the school's present position. Figures and statistics of accidents that may happen in conditions like this are a very poor guide indeed. I very much hope that nobody will think that this is a dangerous area. In fact, so far as we can form an opinion at all, either from past experience or from the advice at our disposal, it is anything but a dangerous area. The Ministry of Civil Aviation, which is responsible for considering these matters, holds the view that there is certainly no need to abandon this school. What we should avoid doing is to enlarge it in the present circumstances.

My hon. Friend has drawn attention in some detail to the teaching difficulties where the school itself is beset by the noise of aircraft and where the numbers of children attending the school are so great that it is necessary to use other class rooms. I do not want it to be thought that the local education authority has not already been alerted to these problems. Indeed, it has been aware of them for some time and has gone a long way in the preparation of plans to meet these new needs.

My hon. Friend will be aware that the Essex County Council is one of the largest spenders among all the education authorities in its arrangements for providing new school accommodation for the ever-increasing number of children for which it is responsible. In order to deal with this problem in this area it has made arrangements as follows: the Hawkwell Holt Primary School, to which my hon. Friend made some reference, will be ready in April, 1960. It will provide 160 places which will first be used by children from the secondary school as a temporary measure to relieve the congestion and complication of secondary education at the present site.

The Hockley Secondary Modern School is now being built and will be ready in September next year. About 40 places in that school will be available to children who fall within the catchment area of the Rochford school and will, to that extent, relieve pressure on Rochford. The local education authority is trying at the present time to complete negotiations for the acquisition of the Oxford Road site to which my non. Friend referred. Negotiations are almost completed. There are only one or two minor details to finalise and that school will be in the building programme for 1960–61. At present that school is proposed as a two form entry school, and I think that my hon. Friend is quite justified in complaining that that is not enough.

Mr. Braine

The local education authority is still not taking sufficient account, in my view, of the fact that development is taking place all the time and that by the time this provision is made the population will have gone up by another few thousand.

Mr. Thompson

This is a race between demands and resources, and the local authority can only do its best. It is in process of acquiring the Oxford Road site at present for a two form entry school, and I am pleased to inform the House that we propose to approve plans for this to be a four form entry school in the hope that this will help to relieve the problem.

I hope that my hon. Friend will not think that this is the immediate solution of the problem. All these things take some time. I read yesterday of a reminder by Lord Alanbrooke that someone once said that war is an option of difficulties. So are many of the practices of peace, and all that we can try to do is to meet the ever-changing and ever-increasing demands of peace by applying our resources wherever the need is greatest to relieve that need to the best of our ability.

We hope to reach a decision shortly when it will be possible to allow the local authority to build a four form entry school to meet the demand which my hon. Friend has described so graphically, and as soon as that decision is reached I will let him know and write to the authority as soon as possible.

Mr. Braine

May I express my grateful thanks to my hon. Friend for the very quick response that he has given to my plea?

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at twenty-nine minutes to Eleven o'clock.