HC Deb 25 March 1971 vol 814 cc977-87
Mr. Deputy Speaker

Before I call the hon. Member for Derbyshire, West (Mr. Scott-Hopkins), I am sure he will forgive me if I remind him, although I do not think that he needs reminding, that the same rules apply to his as to the last debate.

8.43 p.m.

Mr. James Scott-Hopkins (Derbyshire, West)

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. You are quite right. This will be one of the most difficult debates, because the terms of the Supplementary Estimate are much narrower than I originally thought and it will be a litle difficult to stay within order, but with your help I am sure that we shall be able to do so.

I do not think that there is any doubt about the distress of some primary schools, and I make it clear that, because of the way in which the Supplementary Estimate is drawn, I am talking about aided and controlled schools in the primary sector. As far as I can make out, there are about 8,474 in all scattered throughout the country, a fairly high proportion in the Midlands and the north of England. They are mainly Church of England, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Methodist and so on.

Nobody would deny that this type of school, particularly in country areas, is in a distressed condition. These schools are always worst off. I do not say that they have been neglected over the years, but they certainly seem to have been. Many of those in the country areas are grant-aided and controlled, direct grant and maintained primary schools built before 1903, most in the last century. They have a great tradition which no one would want to question. Because they are grant aided and mainly run by religious authorities, they rightly hold dearly to their prerogative to appoint governors and staff, and long may they continue so to do.

But that does not get away from the fact that their fabric is often in sore need, not falling down, but in a very poor condition. The comparison between these 19th century primary schools and today's modern primary schools is laughable. They have thick walls. They are, I am sorry to say, cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and in many ways they are inadequate. One can understand how this has arisen, and yet here, in the Estimate which we are discussing, there is in total a provision of £16,700,000, with an increase over the original of £490,000. This is the actual increase of the building grants.

I have raised the matter because this is not adequate enough. I quite understand that we are talking about, virtually, what has happened, because the year 1970–71 has finished. Although this has been an increase during the past year. up to the 31st March, I am really saying that it was not adequate in that year and praying in aid the fact that in the coming years, 1971–72, 1972–73 and onwards, there will be an increase over the allocation which has taken place in the past.

Before I am ruled out of order, may I say that this matter is relevant because what has been described will affect what will happen next year. The starts this year of new building programmes will be extremely important for next year and the years after it. Therefore, it is essential that we should have the matter clearly in the open. The primary school sector, the grant aided, controlled sector, has been getting a rough deal in the past and is in the present.

I am not allotting any political blame. That is not the right sort of thing to talk about in the educational context, especially in the context of building and repair programmes. I am trying to establish that there is a need and that these aided schools, particularly, are in the greatest need.

In my own county of Derbyshire, where my constituency is, and also in the constituency which I had the honour to represent earlier, in North Cornwall, one sees this problem raising its head. In Derbyshire, for instance, there are 240 such primary schools which were built in the nineteenth century. Ninety-three of them are over 100 years old. There are 279 of them that have no interior lavatories. The toilet arrangements are outside and the children have to go across yards to reach them. They are not all State-aided schools—some are direct maintained schools—but the majority are in that category.

The difficulty is, and has been, especially in the primary sector for the local education authority, which has been very diligent in putting forward to my hon. and right hon. Friend in the Ministry the case for improving, this year, last year and next year, the allocation of moneys for this work. But in the past the snag has been that minor works money has been used.

I am glad to see in HANSARD of 22nd March, in reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maude), that the Minister gave a list of the increased grant for minor works. A large proportion of this, I trust, will be used for minor works in the grant aided sector primary schools. The figure for Derbyshire is being increased by £75,000. That may or may not seem very much, but nevertheless it is a welcome increase for the coming year and will help a lot.

But this minor works money allocation has been used this year in the grant aided schools, and will be next year, and perhaps the increased allocation can allow for new hutted accommodation. Therefore we have the position where, although there is a very small growth in those rural areas, there is growth; but it is being dealt with by allocation of money through minor works. The result is that there is rarely a startling case in which an education authority can tell the Ministry that it is in dire straits because hundreds of children for whom it is responsible have no roofs over their heads. This state of affairs has arisen because action has been taken here and there and small sums have been allocated for huts to go up here and there. This has been particularly true of the grant-aided sector as well as in the other sectors of primary-education.

There is no drama, but the net result is that in Derbyshire alone 2,500 school- children are being educated in hutted accommodation attached in many cases to very ancient schools. This cannot be right. I know that my hon. Friend has the interests of these small schools at heart. The allocation in this Supplementary Estimate shows that the heart is in the right area.

I hope that my right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend will not ignore the rural areas where the growth is slow and where schools were built a long time ago. The accommodation is not adequate. I do not plead for reorganisation. The grant-aided schools may have to be organised differently. Perhaps they will have to be taken over as maintained schools, but I would regret that. Nevertheless, there is a great need for help in rural areas.

My hon. Friend has been very helpful in the last six months with an increased allocation for minor works and with an extra allocation for building works in secondary schools, but he can help tremendously by paying particular attention to the grant-aided, the special agreement school sector and the maintained sector of the primary schools. They cannot and must not be allowed to lag behind the other sectors of education, which have had a very fair, perhaps too fair, slice of the cake in the past. I hope that he will be able so to persuade the Treasury that in the coming years the primary sector of education in rural areas will get a better deal than it has had in the past.

8.52 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mr. William van Straubenzee)

I will respond as fully as I can to the requests made by my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, West (Mr. Scott-Hopkins) in pursuance of a consistent and persistent representation, not only of his constituency and of his county, but of the interests of education generally which, being as it were on the other side of the table, I have come very much to respect. We have all listened to another example of it today.

Like my hon. Friend, I am restricted by the rules of order to the strict subject matter of the Supplementary Estimate. If I state something by way of background, it is merely with a view all the time to returning to Sub-head G of Class VII which we are discussing. I shall therefore hope to keep very strictly in order.

First—I know that my hon. Friend and I think absolutely alike in this—hidden in the figures of this Supplementary Estimate lie the seeds of a change of emphasis. My hon. Friend is right to remind the House that we are talking about the financial year which ends in April, 1971. Nevertheless, the beginnings of a change of policy are there and I believe that they will develop as time passes and that in subsequent years a Supplementary Estimate such as this will increasingly reflect the priority which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is giving in her educational programme to the primary schools.

I know that this is welcome to my hon. Friend. It is in part reflected in these figures, although they refer only to the aided and special agreement schools. It is done directly to implement a pledge upon which we contested the General Election and which was subsequently seen on the White Paper on Public Expenditure last autumn. In short, there has been a deliberate shift of resources towards primary schools. I gladly bring out that point in relation to this Estimate, and in relation to the aided and special agreement schools.

I have to remind the House that shifting resources within a total must necessarily mean spending less on some things and more on others. For example, the House will recall that only very recently I was being attacked as a result of a decision to spend less on school milk and school dinners. I refer to that matter only in passing in order to make the argument and not to discuss that other matter: the point is that, in return for these economies, we are devoting to primary school building more resources than ever before.

The background to this Supplementary Estimate—for we all understand that the voluntary schools form part of one broad pattern—is, quite frankly, twofold.

First of all, secondary schools have in physical terms done better than primary schools from successive building programmes in the past. It was 10 years ago that I had the privilege of being Parliamentary Private Secretary to my noble Friend Lord Eccles, as he now is, who launched a drive for the reorganisation of all-age schools in rural counties. That drive affected the aided schools that we are now discussing.

Then, in the White Paper of 1958 attention was focussed on the improvement and replacement of old secondary schools, which, again, included the aided schools, with particular emphasis on accommodation for science. The building programmes up to 1967 included large sums for this purpose, and the result was that very little was left over for improving the primary schools. That is the point I make in relation to the Supplementary Estimate.

Under the last Government the building programmes were heavily weighted towards the secondary schools because of the expected growth in numbers. Finally, there was the special programme of over £100 million for raising the school-leaving age. From 1964 to 1970 the only special programme for primary school improvement was an allocation of £16 million for educational priority areas.

The results of this emphasis on secondary school building are to be seen in the figures. Nearly 20 per cent. of primary school children in England and Wales are in schools built before 1903 for which there is a continuing need and which must be replaced or substantially improved. The corresponding figure for secondary schools is only 5 per cent. At the other end of the scale the number of primary school places brought into use since the war by major and minor projects represents only just over 50 per cent. of the present primary school roll. For secondary schools, the figure is 75 per cent.

So my first point is that, in relation to aided schools, as well as to the other sector which we are not discussing, there is on the figures alone a very good case for doing more for the primary schools. I know my hon. Friend agrees with me that the argument for doing this is much stronger than that.

The reason is that often when a young person has done admirably well in further or higher education, it is possible to trace it back to the unsung and largely unpublicised work of some man or woman who tutored that child in the infant and primary stage. This is the foundation upon which all else rests, and that is why hidden in these figures there are the beginnings of a shift of emphasis. The total schools starts programme, primary and secondary, over the whole range for England and Wales in 1972–73, including the major programmes of raising the school-leaving age and minor works, now stands at £188 million, which is the same as in 1971–72. The important difference between the two years lies in the breakdown of the total.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Robert Grant-Ferris)

Order. The hon. Gentleman is going beyond the Supplementary Estimates, and I shall have to ask him to keep to them. The hon. Member for Derbyshire, West (Mr. Scott-Hopkins) could have enlarged on all sorts of subjects but he did not, and I must ask the hon. Gentleman to answer the points raised by his hon. Friend in the terms of the Supplementary Estimates.

Mr. van Straubenzee

I am obliged to you, Sir Robert. In a complete building programme which includes all schools it is extraordinarily difficult and artificial to take out one segment.

Mr. Scott-Hopkins

Would my hon. hon. Friend not agree that a fairly easy division is that primary sector schools are about a third of the total? Can I assume that about a third of the total allocation of moneys will be going to the primary aided sector?

Mr. van Straubenzee

That is not absolutely right because the contributions between the State on the one hand and the voluntarly bodies on the other enter into it. As a general supposition, that assists, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend. In the aided sector we now have the opportunity, which I am certain the voluntary bodies—the churches primarily—as well as the local authorities in partnership with the aided and special agreement schools, will be keen to take, to make a dramatic increase in the programme for improvement and replacement of old schools. The beginning of that are shown in the figures we are discussing. I cannot go into the figures overall but I would like to take up the point referred to by my hon. Friend of the distribution of the improvement programme between different parts of the country.

These figures refer to the year ending April, 1971, and it will assist my hon. Friend to see what our thinking is. I believe it directly answers his point if I explain that the programme for educational priority areas and the programme for 1971–72 were allocated overwhelmingly to urban areas with acute social need. Evidence is beginning to come in that there are important effects as a result of the building of new primary schools, and this is encouraging. The effect of the much larger figures for 1972–73 was that my right hon. Friend was able to look wider. The result is that that programme includes a large number of projects designed to replace old schools in rural areas. In total there are 75 projects of this kind to a value of over £4.5 million at the present cost limits.

My hon. Friend, who represents a rural area, knows that in relation to reorganisation, particularly of primary schools in the aided sector—and I am referring only to the aided schools—there are often very real problems in a village community. Neither he nor I must overlook the very real problems which sometimes arise. Nevertheless, I look for very firm progress in that sector.

The programme for the replacement of rural primary schools in 1972–73 which will flow from these figures is about equally divided between county and voluntary schools. This is the answer to my hon. Friend's second question. Nearly 40 voluntary school projects at a cost of £2.5 million are included in the programme. Where the projects relate to aided schools, the managers will get grant at 80 per cent. from my Department on the cost of the building.

I end by referring to two specific points which assist the schools we are discussing and which are directly helpful to them. My hon. Friend was courteous enough to refer to one of them, and that is the announcement of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in answer to a Written Question on Monday that allocations for minor works, which for this purpose are projects costing up to about £30,000 each, are being increased by about £2 million in 1971–72 and 1972–73.

Mr, Scott-Hopkins

In each year?

Mr. van Straubenzee

Yes. This will be of direct assistance to the aided sector.

The figures which I have given are overall figures. About two-thirds of these extra resources will go to 17 counties whose primary school numbers are increasing much faster than the national average or which have other special needs —for example, a large number of small, old primary schools which can be effectively improved by minor projects. It is that same category of aided school which is covered by the Supplementary Estimates. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his generous welcome of the announcement.

A second step which has been taken within the last 24 hours is the increase of 13 per cent. in cost limits for school building which will apply to all projects due to start after 31st March, 1971. I cannot discuss this, because it is only a matter of days between 31st March and 5th April, and I will not, therefore, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, trespass upon your kindly generosity by referring further to it. In relation to the schools which we are discussing, that is a second alleviation which will be of direct relevance and help to an important sector.

You have been most courteous and kindly, Mr. Deputy Speaker, in allowing my hon. Friend and me certain latitude. It is important for the outside world to understand that we are here discussing a narrow estimate which necessarily gives a certain artificiality to our discussion. I hope, nevertheless, that it will have thrown a searchlight on the sector of school provision which is important to my hon. Friend and which I hope he will accept is important to me.

9.11 p.m.

Mr. Kenneth Marks (Manchester, Gorton)

We are grateful to the hon. Member for Derbyshire, West (Mr. Scott-Hopkins) for raising this matter of school building. I saw some of the schools in his constituency when I took part in the by-election in which he was elected.

The shift of resources which the Under-Secretary of State has spoken of was inevitable rather than deliberate. Building programmes for secondary education are not now so necessary and neither are the overhead programmes in overspill areas. This means that more money is available, and I congratulate the Government on using these resources for primary schools. This would have been inevitable, whichever Government had come to power after the General Election.

The managers and diocesan authorities have a special problem. I do not know whether I am in order in referring to Sub-head H, which shows a reduction in loans for aided and special agreement schools because fewer applications than expected have been received. The managers of these schools have to make up their minds not only upon the building programme which they need and the cost of it, but also on whether they can afford it, or will have to go to controlled status to raise the necessary money.

There is a school in my constituency which was originally built as a national school in 1834. Part of the school had to be knocked down and rebuilt. For two years the managers dithered, until finally they made up their minds that the school would have to become a controlled school. There is a need to look well ahead, otherwise we shall not be taking up the amount of grant which is being made available. Although I appreciate that most of these schools are in the rural areas, it is significant that in the great cities, which in the main have had priority in the past, the church primary schools are left still to make this conversion.

There needs to be continual reassessment. The survey which the Under-Secretary of State was kind enough to let me have in reply to a Written Question a few weeks ago shows that there are gaps, and this suggests that not all local education authorities are sure what improvements and replacements are needed. I hope that particular attention will be paid to this matter. There is a need for a priority area. I hope that local education authorities and church authorities will get together about it. Though the schools are denominational in name, many, particularly in rural areas, are taking children not only of a particular faith, but of whatever faith and of no faith at all. So there is this need for consultation between local education authorities and church authorities and an early assessment of the needs and method of controlled or aided status.

Mr. van Straubenzee

Before the hon. Gentleman sits down, I take his point, but I think he will agree, as he is close to the subject, that what is important is the making available of resources. We cannot debate that in any sense tonight, but the hon. Gentleman will know that we inherited an improvement programme for 1972–73 of £11 million, and that has been increased under this Government to £38.5 million. This is the key point in the whole argument.

Mr. Marks

Yes. The point is that programmes are not always held to. They are often increased, as they have been in the past and as in this case. Some of the additions to the programme were not in the original statements made by the Government in the weeks and months immediately following the General Election. We have had one today, and there is to be another on Monday. This is a continually changing programme. I have no doubt that had the General Election result been different, my right hon. Friend would have been making the additions which have been made.