SCHOOLS, BRIGHTON (Hansard, 19 May 1972)

§ Mr. Andrew Bowden (Brighton, Kemptown)

I make no apology for bringing to the attention of the House the overcrowding conditions that exist in the primary and secondary schools in the county borough of Brighton. I am not suggesting that the problems faced by Brighton are unique—I know that, regrettably, they exist in too many of our cities and towns—but it is true to say that the Government are now beginning to make excellent progress in coping with these overcrowding problems. The school building programme for the current financial year, which will exceed £250 million, and which beats all previous records, is a very large step towards coping with these problems.

The Government's further pledge to concentrate on the expansion of the primary schools building programme is being 963 fulfilled and is well under way, remembering that, as planned, it is now four times bigger in the 1972–76 period than it was in the period 1966–70. I am sure that the work of my right hon. Friend, of my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State in this House and of my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State in another place is being more and more widely recognised throughout the country. Nevertheless, it is my job this afternoon to draw attention to the problem in Brighton.

Until quite recently Brighton has had a rather hard time in respect of the amount of money it has obtained for building purposes. In 1962–63, Brighton applied for a total of £739,000, and the authorisation was £166,000. In 1964–65, £521,000 was applied for and the authorisation was nil. A sum of £598,000 was applied for in 1967–68, and the authorisation was £88,000. In 1969–70, £686,000 was applied for and the authorisation was nil. I regret that there seems to be some evidence that, certainly between 1965 and 1970, there was an element of political spite in the then Government's decision to give Brighton so very little.

But I am concerned about the future. The parents of Brighton are concerned about the present and the immediate future conditions in the schools which their children are now attending. The overcrowding problems for the primary and secondary schools are clearly interrelated. I concentrate my attention on two schools, with which I know my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary is familiar, namely, the schools in the Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk areas.

Some aspects of these schools are well below the minimum standards laid down by the school building regulations of 1959. For example, in the Moulsecoomb complex, the school halls, the majority of the classrooms and the play areas are all well below the minimum standards. The play areas, hard paved areas, total at present 13,850 square feet, whereas the minimum required under the school building regulations of 1959 is 39,200 square feet.

Then we have the conditions of the appalling toilets in existence at the Moulsecoomb school complex. The headmistress of the infants school has said: 964 I feel strongly that my staff do all they can, and very much more than necessary, but keeping these toilets clean at all times is an impossibility. At this point I pay tribute to the magnificent work of the staff of all these schools in the face of very great difficulties. The staff themselves have totally inadequate accommodation. In the junior middle school they have a total stiff accommodation of 200 square feet. That is for 23 staff, plus students. They have only two WCs. In the infants first school, there is 200 square feet for 15 staff, plus students, and one WC.

The present site at Moulsecoomb is littered with temporary accommodation. When one talks about temporary accommodation to the people of Moulsecoomb they laugh, because some of this accommodation has been there for 25 years—remembering that in the junior middle school there is accomodation for 1,055 pupils but only 350 of them can be accommodated in the permanent buildings. But one of the most worrying aspects of the whole problem and one of the reasons why I have brought it to the attention of the House today, is that the temporary accommodation is in most cases not connected by either paved areas or any form of overhead protection from the wind and rain and the most adverse weather conditions that prevail periodically in the Brighton area. I have visited the site. After it has been raining during the nasty squalls that hit Brighton, it is a mass of mud and the conditions are absolutely deplorable.

I am sure that the House will understand the feelings of parents in this area when they go to collect their children in the evening or to leave them in the morning and see these conditions, especially when from the hill on which this school stands they can look down upon the new complex of higher education buildings, Sussex University and the College of Education, and see there a total expenditure on those buildings of about £12 million. There is, not without justification, real bitterness in the area that so little money has been found to help them with their problems.

It was in this context and with this problem facing the Brighton Education Committee that the Director of Education wrote to the Department on 2nd May 965 1972 asking for permission to transfer approximately £1 million from the further education programme to the primary and secondary programme in the Brighton area. I quote two paragraphs from the letter: 11. The Technical College like the primary and secondary schools provides largely for local residents and whilst the Authority has no doubt that the new Engineering and Science Block is much needed, the needs of the schools in the area are more urgent and greater. He is referring to the primary-secondary school area. 14. That such a request is unusual, perhaps unprecedented, is fully understood but, knowing well the relative claims of the Further Education and School Sectors within its own area, the Authority is convinced of the more immediate needs of the schools and hopes that the Secretary of State will accept that these needs must be met, albeit in the short-term at the expense of the Technical College. I have been unable to find a precedent where any such transfer from one sector of education to another has been granted. There is always the first time. I ask my hon. Friend to consider what occurred recently where a school within the Inner London Area made an application which is not dissimilar from, although I accept that it is not exactly similar to, that of Brighton. I quote from a recent report in theTeacher: After turning down six secondary school building projects submitted to her by the Inner London Education Authority, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, the Education Secretary, has now agreed to a £700,000 scheme for a London school. The reason given for allowing new buildings at Bal ham Boys' Secondary School, Wandsworth, is that they will help to ease problems of primary school accommodation in the area. I assure my hon. Friend that the two schemes—the Dorothy Stringer scheme and the Westlain Scheme—are needed to cope with the serious primary school problems we face. Brighton Education Committee is very concerned that, unless we can get these schemes under way rapidly, it is possible that we shall not be able to fulfil our statutory obligations under the 1944 Act. We need approval for both schemes. I know that we have approval for future years, but without the operation of them both together it cannot fully solve our primary school problems.

966 I know that I am asking the Minister to make education history. I am sure that the Department has considered the request very carefully and fully. I am convinced that a way must be found to help these schools during the next 12 months. For 22 years Her Majesty's school inspectors have underlined the deficiencies of which the authority has informed the Department and have endorsed the proposals to use the whole of the permanent accommodation on the Moulsecoomb site for primary school purposes.

In the last resort I ask my hon. Friend to give the most careful consideration to allow Brighton Education Authority a substantial amount of additional minor works money. This would enable the education Committee to put in hand a programme of overhead coverings, paved pathways, and perhaps another one or two demountable classrooms which could go a long way towards coping with some of the immediate problems. These schools need help very quickly.

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

All of us who have admired the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Mr. Bowden) as a constituency member since he has been in the House have respected him for the very successful advocacy of his constituents' interests. Today is no exception to a long line of similar occasions.

I want him to understand that I am anxious to respond as helpfully as I am able, and I start from the base line that I do not want a single note of complacency to appear in what I say about the conditions in the schools which he mentioned. He and I, and indeed, the whole education service, would like to see those conditions improved at the earliest possible moment.

My hon. Friend was generous enough to point to what had been done particularly in relation to the replacement of primary schools under the present Government, but my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State would be the last person who would wish to breathe complacency. There are some shameful conditions, to some of which my hon. Friend has drawn attention, in his own county borough and I am only too well aware of 967 the large number that all of us want to get our hands on.

The background, as I understand it, is that for the year which starts building in April, 1973—and I shall throughout use that formula; I believe that although we understand it, the reference to 1973–1974 as a financial year is not always easy for our constituents to understand —the county borough of Brighton put in to my right hon. Friend a number of projects in order of priority. Obviously, one would like to have done everything at once. So would every other authority. But all of us accept that a certain measure of priority is absolutely necessary. That is how each authority places an order, relating to what it wants to do in each year.

In that year, for reasons which I feel sure the county borough had considered carefully, it put first of all the projects for Hollingdean middle school and Wilson Avenue Secondary School, and they are programmed, as my hon. Friend will know. In broad figures, they total £500,000; and throughout I shall talk in broad figures. It is perfectly true that for that year it also put to my hon. Friend projects at the Dorothy Stringer School and at Westlain which it would have liked to have done in the same year.

Incidentally, had that been agreed, it would have made its allocation for the year alone £1 million in this field, which is not small money by anybody's standard. It is equally fair to say that my right hon. Friend did not feel that with her responsibilities for the whole country she could accede to a programme of that size in one year.

May I say in parenthesis that I remember being very courteously received by Miss Stringer, and I know well her immense renown well beyond her county borough for her services to education. It was very pleasant, therefore, to see her name mentioned again.

Understandably, the county borough authorities and my hon. Friend did not feel satisfied with that, and my hon. Friend therefore led a deputation and saw my noble Friend in March. What I think he has not said with sufficient emphasis, because it depended considerably upon his own personal advocacy, is that it was as a result of that deputation 968 in March, 1972, that the Dorothy Stringer project was put into the programme starting building in April, 1974, the year after one to which I have previously referred—incidentally, that is a £250,000 project—and the Westlain project was put into the programme which starts building m the year beginning April, 1975, this latter project being, in round figures, for £200,000.

I hope that my hon. Friend will feel that this situation shows that the Department, and my right hon. Friend in particular, were receptive to the very effective argument presented to us. It was effective in this way. As my hon. Friend said—I know that he supports it—it is the Secretary of State's policy to concentrate her replacement programme overwhelmingly on the replacement of old primary schools. These two projects are secondary projects. But, as he rightly said, the effect is substantially to alleviate very bad conditions in a primary school. It illustrates, therefore, that the policy is flexible. I hope that my hon. Friend feels that it was the right decision to make, and I hope also that the county borough will give the appropriate credit where credit is due to those who argued the case.

We are not arguing here about whether these two projects should be programmed. We are arguing about when they should be programmed. They are there, and what has been decided will, I hope and believe, be an enormous encouragement to the parents concerned.

In addition, as my hon. Friend pointed out, the county borough has made application to transfer to this purpose some or all of the money at present allocated for extensions to the technical college. Here, I have to remind my hon. Friend, and, through him, his constituents, that for several years the county borough of Brighton, quite rightly, I have no doubt, has been telling the Department that the extensions to the technical college are urgent. Again, in round figures, I am speaking here of a £1 million project. Last November, as a result of continuous representation over a period of time—I think that my hon. Friend could legitimately have criticised the Department for not having done this before, but he did not—it was put into the programme, and it is now in the programme 969 which starts building in the year beginning April, 1974.

True, in November last Brighton was given the option, with other authorities, of bringing the project forward one year if it wanted to and if it could. I do not criticise Brighton for not doing so. These are large projects. A £1 million scheme is, by any standards, a major project; it has to be carefully researched, programmed and prepared for in the matter of sites and the rest. Brighton was given that opportunity and did not take advantage of it. I make no citicism of that; I merely state as a fact that it did not take the option up. The project is, therefore, in the programme which starts building in the year beginning April, 1974.

That is precisely the same year as the year in which the Dorothy Stringer project has been programmed. There is no point, therefore, even as an academic exercise, in making a switch in that year. There would, theoretically, be some point in so doing for the year later and bringing forward Westlain—I can see an argument for that—but by far the greater part, the £250,000 project which is so important to my hon. Friend's constituents, is programmed to start in precisely the same year as is the technical college extension.

I could not help but notice that the request to switch the money from the technical college was not a unanimous decision in the authority, and I must tell my hon. Friend that I have had strong representations against doing it from, for example, the ATTI and other professional bodies.

The mums of today who are rightly asking for action in respect of, say, Moulsecoomb, and who now see that it is programmed and is, therefore, under action, will before very long be the mums of tomorrow whose young people will, I hope, be going to the technical college. I simply ask my hon. Friend, and through him his constituents, to see this not as a matter of rival claims, with one against 970 the other, but as part of the whole. Nothing could be more practical than the extensions. The provision of engineering workshops, drawing offices, and a laboratory for the engineering, construction and applied science departments of the technical college is not some rarefied academic exercise. This is down to earth stuff. I believe that Brighton will always be the custodian for a wider catchment area in this respect than just the county borough. Roughly half the students of the Brighton technical college come from outside the county borough and, as my hon. Friend will know, there is a cost recoupment system so that all the expense does not fall upon the hon. Member's constituents.

I think in settling the programme for further education we have to look at these wider considerations and to see them as part of the whole. Therefore, I cannot hold out any hope to my hon. Friend that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will be prepared to see a switch of the kind that is suggested. I hope he will feel that I have shown very clearly, in any event for the Dorothy Stringer project, that this has no bearing because both projects start in the same year. I have sought to show that action has been taken directly as a result of representations which have been made.

My hon. Friend raised the question of the allocation for minor works. I will undertake, as a result of these further representations, to look sympathetically at a request by the county borough, if it is made to us, for an increased allocation under the minor works programme to assist with the kind of difficulties which my hon. Friend so tellingly illustrated. I hope in that spirit that all sections of the education service in the county borough can go forward and not feel they are rivals, but rather partners in the education of young people of the town.