JUNIOR SCHOOLS (ATTERCLIFFE) (Hansard, 19 June 1969)

§ Mr. John Hynd (Sheffield, Attercliffe)

I apologise to the Minister of State for causing her the inconvenience of having to be present tonight to answer this debate, but at least my constituents will recognise that it is a further sign of the democratic basis of our Parliamentary procedure.

The situation to which I wish to refer is not untypical. I refer to a school in my constituency, which is the cause for some concern throughout the area and to the city council, namely, the Gleadless county junior school, built in 1894, when the population was some 3,000. The population has now risen to 28,000.

The original building contained six classes in the main building, which have been added to by six temporary hutments, the life of which was supposed to have been five years. Two of these additions were built in 1944 and still serve as classrooms. In the interim period since 1894 the playground, which was meant to cater for the children of a population of 3,000 has since been halved to provide accommodation for school meals, prayers, and other assemblies, and for the children of a population now numbering 28,000.

Imagine the serious situation in the classes. I know that many other schools have classes with over 35 or 40 children. At Gleadless school there are 15 classes, nine with over 40 pupils and two with 46 pupils each. The school at present caters for 623 children, which, in September of this year, will rise to 662, giving an average of 44 per class—if the school can accommodate them. But the fact is that it will not be able to accommodate them, and, in fact, has not been able to accommodate the normal flow of children for the area. This year, 22 children had to be excluded, and last year the number of children excluded was 52. The school is expecting an influx of 100 in September, of which 50 will not be accommodated.

The anomaly of the situation, which makes it more difficult for parents to 848 accept it, is that opposite the school is a piece of land belonging to the local education authority which has been acquired for building a new middle school to relieve the pressure on the old school in Gleadless. But this project, like other projects, has been held up by the Department of Education and Science on the ground of the need to restrict expenditure.

Because of its very progressive policy in education—the building and development of comprehensive schools in the area, for which it has an outstanding record—the local authority has exhausted the capital allocations fixed by the Minister. These are already fully committed. Therefore, there is no possibility of building any extension to the school out of any capital expenditure at the moment.

There have, naturally, been considerable protests. A number of meetings have been held by the parents. With the local education officer, the head of the school and representatives of the city council I have attended two very crowded meetings.

The city council is very concerned about the situation. I gather that within recent days almost, the city council has been able to find ways and means of producing sufficient revenue to rent a couple of mobile classrooms, which should be available in September, to relieve the position. However, this will not meet the long-term or even the middle-term situation.

I understand that the education administrative officer has been to London within the last week and met officials of the Department. I gather that the Department has apparently now agreed, according to the local authority representative, to place the project for the new middle school on the 1969–70 preliminary list. Will the Minister explain what this means?

In a letter of 11th June to one of the parents leading the protest, the Department states: Because of the expected increase in the population in the next few years"— it certainly recognises that— there is a likelihood that the new middle school will be included on the list of projects 849 which the authority will be able to start in the financial year 1971–72. How this relates to the preliminary list for 1969–70 I am not very clear. Perhaps the Minister will explain.

I hope, also, that my right hon. Friend will be able to tell me whether, in either of these statements, there is any firm commitment that this middle school development will go ahead within the foreseeable future, because we cannot overlook the fact that there have been previous postponements of this project. Naturally, there is considerable nervousness among those directly concerned that there might again be postponements for one reason or another, even if the project goes on this preliminary list or is in the list of projects for 1971–72.

I do not raise this matter in any form of carping criticism of the Government or their policy. I fully recognise their present financial difficulties and the elephantine demands of education throughout the country. I have explained this in full to the meetings of parents which I have attended to try to get the picture at least in balance.

I pay tribute to the Government's general record in education: the number of new schools which have been built, the number of teachers under training, and the general progress which has been made over the last two or three years. Indeed, at the last meeting of parents protesting about this issue which I attended, which was also attended by one or two Conservative councillors, I mentioned that the Government now have a record, for the first time in our history, of spending more on education than on defence. It may be no surprise that the two Conservative councillors present at the meeting immediately interjected loud cries of "Shame!" when I made this announcement. That merely illustrates the difference in approach to the priorities of these matters.

Therefore, I am not criticising the general policy or approach of the Government. And I am certainly not criticising the local authority, because in Sheffield there is a wonderful display of new modern schools. Progress with comprehensive school building is probably as good, if not better, than in any other city in the country. Must all this be at the 850 expense of such pockets of frustration as one finds in some of our big cities, as illustrated by the case of Gleadless and others which could be quoted in Sheffield?

The problem of junior schools cannot be ignored. However important the development of secondary and comprehensive schools, they must march in line with them. There are financial problems, but if one is considering the financial aspect one must recognise that the primary education of our young children is the soundest investment that this country can make in times of prosperity or otherwise. One must also recognise the justified anxieties of the parents.

There has been some talk about the possibility of transferring a number of the children coming forward for the next term to Frecheville, a school within two or three miles of this one, which would mean children having to cross a very busy main trunk road, but I gather that this idea has now been dropped, or is likely to be dropped, because Frecheville and all the other schools within the area are either full or will be full next term.

I trust that that will not be necessary. I hope that the two mobile classrooms will be forthcoming by September—that will hold the position—but that the Minister will not accept that as an excuse for delaying whatever urgent action is possible, within the present limitations, to set about building the extension school for which the land is available, and for which the Government are apparently prepared to give authority within the next two years. I hope that it will be sooner.

I hope, too, that from this short debate we can have some reassurance that I can give my constituents.

§ The Minister of State, Department of Education and Science (Miss Alice Bacon)

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. John Hynd) for the moderate way in which he has presented his case, and also for letting me know in advance fully the points that he wished to raise. I know of the natural concern which is felt by the parents about this school which is housed in an old building and where the number of pupils is increasing. 851 But before dealing with this particular school it may be helpful if I say a few words about the school building programme and the method of allocating resources.

The school building programme for this year is £138½ million, which compares with £85 million in 1964. Next year it will be more than £160 million, which will include £25 million for raising the school-leaving age, and this will be the highest-ever expenditure on school building. In 1968–69 Sheffield was allocated £825,609 for starts in school building, and in 1969–70, this year, it was allocated nearly £712,000, so I think that Sheffield has had a fair share of the building programme.

Even though we are spending that amount of money on school building, every year sees an increase in the school population, and extra places have to be found. One of our chief difficulties about school building is that the population of this country is not remaining still. It is moving. Populations are moving to new housing estates, or even to new towns, and this means that we have to give the first priority to those areas where there would otherwise be no school at all.

I sympathise with my hon. Friend when he says that in the older part of Sheffield there are the old schools, because, as he knows, I sit for a part of the neighbouring City of Leeds, and I have the same problem in my constituency. The Leeds City Council—as, I am sure, the Sheffield City Council—has had to provide most of the new schools in the city for the new housing estates where huge new populations have grown up, so the older parts of the city have had to be content with the older schools.

I know that there are many substandard schools in the country which ought to have been dealt with years ago, and I am sorry that these have had to take second place in the queue. However, the Government allocated £16 million to be spent in 1968–69 and 1969–70 for replacing old schools in deprived areas. Sheffield benefited from this, and received a special allocation of over £517,000.

With regard to Gleadless school, in assessing the need for additional places 852 which can arise either because of the effect of new housing or because of the increase in numbers of children coming from existing houses, we have to look at the places available not only in the existing school catchment area but also at other schools within reasonable distance. If there are accessible vacant places, we must take account of them even though using them might involve some inconvenience. Otherwise, there would be an unnecessary duplication of places, and this would be an unjustifiable use of scarce building resources at a time when there is a serious backlog of really unsatisfactory old school buildings to be improved and replaced; a number of them in Sheffield.

On one or two occasions in the past we have considered proposals put forward by the Sheffield local education authority for an additional school in the Gleadless area. It has been clear—and I am talking now about the past—that taking into account the effect of some new housing developments numbers in the school were increasing, and would continue to grow, although fairly slowly compared with some situations elsewhere. But we also found that there was a substantial number of vacancies at the school which my hon. Friend has mentioned—the primary school of Frecheville—which is between a mile and a mile and a half away, and which is no further away from the Gleadless school than some children are having to travel to the Gleadless school now.

Looking at this wider area, the case for the new school was less strong, and in view of the many urgent claims, including some for replacement of really old school buildings in Sheffield itself, we decided to defer the new school for Gleadless until the need was established over a wider area. Therefore, this school was not in the recently announced list of major building on which we have agreed that design work can start with a view to beginning building work in the year 1970–71.

I can well understand my hon. Friend's being a little confused about the preliminary list, the design list and the starts list, because we have just adopted in my Department a new procedure for allocating school building. In the past, an announcement has been made of the buildings which could start in the next year, but this has in many instances been 853 so late in being announced that the local authorities have not been able to start the schools that they were allocated in that particular year. So there grew up a backlog of schools which had been allocated in previous years but had not been started. This meant that perhaps other schools of other local authorities were being held back because some authorities had been allocated schools which they could not start.

Now we are putting an end to that position. We decided on a new procedure whereby we do it on a three-year basis. In the first year, we announce the preliminary list of schools that may be considered in the next two years. Then, in the next year, we announce the design list, so that the local authority can get ahead with the plans and design.

Then we announce the starts list and the local authority are then in a position to start any time after 1st April of that year. They must start this school within the year in which it is put on the starts list. This is in order that we can have some control over what is happening in local authorities. The starts list and the design list for this year have already been announced.

The situation in the Gleadless School area is expected to build up and information that has been more recently supplied by the local education authority in support of a new claim to start building work in 1971–72 confirms that numbers in both areas are slowly increasing and that the vacant places in the Frecheville school will all be required before very long for children from its own catchment area. As far as I understand it, this will not be in the next term, but in the next year or two.

At present I can only say—and I give a pledge on this—that in the light of this situation we will consider as sympathetically as possible whether the new school for the Gleadless area can be included in the preliminary list to be announced shortly, for schools expected to start in April, 1971.

854 I realise that this will seem a long way ahead to parents in the area concerned about facilities for their children. I hope, however, that they will be able to appreciate the wider situation and understand that the delay in providing the new school for Gleadless is not due to any lack of understanding of their feelings or problems, but because we have a limited, although substantial, amount of resources available for the major building programme which we must deploy in the best way possible.

It would obviously be unfair to those with urgent problems elsewhere to provide a new school for Gleadless area before the justification for anything like the scale of provision proposed exists.

In the meantime, I know that the local education authority will do all it can to make things as satisfactory as possible for the existing Gleadless school. Local education authorities, like the Department, are limited by the resources at their disposal, but I understand that the Sheffield authority has decided to hire a double mobile classroom unit which will be put on the site of the existing Gleadless school and which will help to relieve accommodation problems until a new school can be built.

These mobile classrooms are not anything like the huts which my hon. Friend the Member for Attercliffe has described. I have seen a great many of them in the country, and most of them are better in building and equipment than some of the older schools. They are very good indeed.

The Sheffield authority is providing this unit; the starts and design lists have already been announced. I am now considering the preliminary list which would mean a start from 1st April, 1971. This list will be announced for the whole country shortly and I will undertake that I will consider this school as sympathetically as possible.