HC Deb 27 June 1983 vol 44 cc436-42

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

10 pm

Mr. T. H. H. Skeet (Bedfordshire, North)

I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State on his appointment. At the outset, I should also say that during the currency of the events about which I shall talk, he did not hold his present post. I am also delighted that the former Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North (Dr. Boyson), is with us. I am also pleased to see here my hon. Friend the Member for Bedfordshire, South-West (Mr. Madel), and I dare say that he will wish to make a contribution on some of the points that are raised.

As to the closure of the four village schools in north Bedfordshire, I should lay before the House the facts as I see them. Section 12 notices were issued under the Education Act 1980 in respect of Pavenham, Odell, Little Staughton and Stevington schools. In due course, further evidence was adduced by delegations from the schools to the then Under-Secretary on 26 January and 16 February 1983. On 28 April, I was called by the Under-Secretary and advised that Pavenham and Odell would have to close. No information was available on the other two schools, although I stressed to the then Under-Secretary that in my judgment the continuance of both Little Staughton and Stevington was vital. As a general election was imminent, I approached the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North, about the remaining schools and advised him that during such an election I would be asked about the schools in Little Staughton and Stevington and that it would be prudent on my part to establish the position of each. I was told that both schools would be retained and that a letter would not be despatched until after the general election.

Following the general election on 9 June, there was a ministerial reshuffle. The former Under-Secretary became Minster for Social Security. I congratulate him on his appointment and wish him well in his new Department. My hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn) was brought into the Department of Education and Science as an Under-Secretary. The Secretary of State continued in office. Within a day or so after the election, he called for all the papers, which were apparently studied by him, without the former Under-Secretary's comments to guide him. I am advised that the Secretary of State personally took the decisions on the various schools.

It will be apparent that while my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North was entrusted with the task of listening to delegates from a vast number of schools in England and Wales, which he did remarkably well, when it came to the Secretary of State's ultimate adjudication on Little Staughton and Stevington he had no direct ministerial contact with the delegates who pressed their cases. After all, that was the Under-Secretary of State's responsibility. My right hon. Friend did not have time for consultation with the former Under-Secretary of State who had undertaken new responsibilities elsewhere. Therefore, the Secretary of State was at the mercy of his civil servants who, apparently, are adamant about closing village schools as fast as practicable for educational reasons.

In 1979, there were 61 approved closures of primary schools, in 1980 there were 83, in 1981 there were 189, in 1982 there were 175 and, up to 31 May 1983 there were 117. That gives a total of 625. One has only to consider those figures to see that primary schools are being annihilated at great speed. That is a fairly accurate portrayal of the facts as I see them. It seems nonsense that it should be left to a group of civil servants to advise the Secretary of State of what will virtually be their decision.

During the general election campaign, I advised interested parties in Stevington and Little Staughton that I was 75 per cent. sure that the schools in their respective areas would survive. I had sought advice, as a prudent man would, and was told that the two schools would be retained. I was justifiably annoyed when the Secretary of State moved with such speed and closed the lot, not having heard a word of evidence from the delegates nor having followed any consultation with the man whom he carefully appointed to vet the cases for a long time. I have noted that the Gracious Speech states that: My Government will pursue policies for improving standards of education and widening parental choice and influence in relation to schools. I have also noted what is written on page 29 of the Conservative election manifesto of 1983. It reads: We shall continue to seek ways of widening parental choice and influence over their children's school.

Mr. David Madel (Bedfordshire, South-West)

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. The problems that he has described also affect the south-west of the county. Does he agree that, instead of taking it out on rural schools, Bedfordshire county council should seek an urgent meeting with the Secretary of State for Education and Science and the chairman of the Manpower Services Commission to see how we might proceed in regard to surplus places, general expenditure levels and how much extra further education we shall need as a result of the youth training scheme? Does he agree that Bedfordshire county council should steady down and think carefully about what it is doing?

Mr. Skeet

My hon. Friend has made recommendations of which, no doubt, the Under-Secretary of State will take full note. I entirely agree with his suggestions. There has been slaughter in north Bedfordshire and elsewhere. That is regrettable. It is not due simply to the fact that there has been a population displacement. There have been other factors, such as the educational reasons that are so dear to the Department, and others quite beyond that.

I have mentioned the reference in the Gracious Speech to improving standards and widening parental choice. It is a little ironic that parental choice in at least two schools in north Bedfordshire is to be drastically curtailed and parents told not merely that their wishes will be overruled but that their children will be bussed some miles away, often on difficult routes, to other schools in the area. That denigration of parental choice is odd when justification for closures does not exist.

Savings in the case of Little Staughton and Stevington are illusory when compared with the steepening advance in transport and other costs. The savings on Little Staughton are assessed officially at only £8,800 and on Stevington at only £10,700. There are ample opportunities for making substantial savings in a major comprehensive but that is not true of village schools.

For the five to nine-year-olds the educational reasons advanced by Elizabeth House are believed by few outside the Department of Education and Science. The inconvenience for mothers, the disregard for the potential of the villages and the disruption of village life through the removal of another institution is believed to be an unnecessary interference by the Executive.

What worries me is that a report from the council's management group—it is a hung council—is said to be looking at a further 28 village schools due to close in the next five years. Where will the trend toward village school closures end? Must we have more and inevitable centralism for the five to nine-year-old groups?

It may be significant to mention two comments in the Bedfordshire Times recently. The editor states: For more than a year parents have battled long and hard to beat a system which increasingly put economics before the wishes of parents, teachers and children … Six village schools are to close in September and their extinction will save about £56,000 a year on the county council's education budget. Set against the council's overall budget that figure is minute. The real cost will only be seen later in the villages of Bedfordshire where the closures can only serve to speed their decline and rob them of vitality. To kill a village school is to wound the village itself and no amount of first aid will hide the scar. That is a significant paragraph for a local newspaper.

The issue has been of great concern to me, but I must be constructive. What do I believe should be done? The Government must acknowledge that there has been an administrative bungle and that in resolving the issue the two schools should not suffer. Justice must be seen to be done. Reference to the Secretary of State under section 12 is unsatisfactory in practice. Perhaps the issue should be litigated in the courts and the decision taken in by consent, as in the Tirabad primary school case.

Another possibility is to reprieve the schools for another two years to provide time to justify the objections made in the elaborate briefs provided by them. In Little Staughton, for example, 40 applications for new dwellings have been made, which will result in many more families settling in the area.

Another possibility is that the whole procedure be examined again. Does the section 12 notice protect parental rights, or is it an administrative device for confirming county decisions? As an example, my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mr. Stewart) told me that advice on the closure of Hoveringham school was slipped in after the Royal Proclamation in May. It is extraordinary that while hon. Members are engaged in a general election campaign and when Ministers are active on other matters such a closure should be slipped in by the Ministry. I am obliged to my hon. Friend for being present tonight and taking an interest in the debate. For the protection of the citizen, perhaps this is a case for the Ombudsman.

I have posed the questions. I hope that the Under-Secretary will give me hope that the issue will be satisfactorily resolved. I appreciate that I have been hard-hitting. I am defending the rights of my constituents. The reputation of Ministers is not at stake — far from it. Three excellent Ministers are still doing their duties in the usual way. I have the loss of two schools and all the village people are involved in this loss. I do not see why they should go down without a good fight, in this place and elsewhere. That is why I have raised this matter on the Adjournment. I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to give us a satisfactory answer.

10.15 pm
The Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mr. Robert Dunn)

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bedfordshire, North (Mr. Skeet) for his kind wishes on my appointment. As he said, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has recently approved, under section 12 of the Education Act 1980 proposals for the closure of five primary schools in his area — Little Staughton county lower, along with Keysoe county lower, with which it is to merge, Odell voluntary controlled lower school, Pavenham county lower school, and Stevington county lower school. My hon. Friend showed a very close interest in all of these. He brought delegations of objectors to put their case to the previous holder of my office. He wrote letters, and lobbied tirelessly in their cause. I am sure that his constituents are fully aware of the thanks and tribute they owe to him for his efforts.

It may be helpful if I sketch in some of the background to the decisions finally taken in terms both of national policy and of the particular circumstances prevailing in Bedfordshire. First, on national policy, as hon. Members will know, the school age population has been declining for many years. As a result, we have an increasing surplus of places in schools, and there are many schools up and down the country that are now standing half empty. It happens in towns and village alike. By 1986 we expect there to be some 3 million places surplus to requirements nationally. This represents an extraordinary drain on resources.

That is why the Government have urged local authorities to remove surplus places, and will continue to do so. This is not just a matter of cost. Our prime and overriding concern is with the quality of the education received by the pupils in our schools. The Department's circular 2/81 sets out very clearly what we judge to be the educational benefits of closing schools and of taking other action to take empty school places out of use. However, cost has to be considered. It is not sensible to spend money on keeping open empty desks and classrooms. Staffing complements tend to be very expensive. There are much better ways, within the education service itself, in which the money could be well spent. Moreover, it is a fact of life that small schools—be they primary or secondary—usually cannot offer the range of curricula and educational opportunities to which their pupils are entitled, unless they get much more than their fair share of resources.

What I have said so far relates to all schools —primary and secondary, town and country. Let me turn now to how these matters affect village primary schools, which are part of our rural heritage. Surplus places themselves are not the only problem affecting rural primary schools. The sheer size of the remaining pupil roll is another. There are about 1,500 schools across the country, the majority of them in country districts, with fewer than 50 pupils on roll. Let me stress that I do not regard 50 as being in any way a magic threshold. I use it here only to give a feel for the size of the problem.

Some of these schools, I have no doubt, are very good ones. It takes experienced and dedicated staffs to cope with the disadvantages of mixed age teaching, the problems of professional isolation and so on. None the less, it can be done, but it will always be an expensive option for any local authority to keep such schools open and to resource them sufficiently to overcome the disadvantages. If it chooses this course, it must be at the expense of someone else's school or social services, or at the expense of the long-suffering ratepayer.

The Government recognise that there are circumstances in which even some of the smallest schools are best kept open. Some serve such isolated areas that it does not make sense educationally to make young children travel substantial distances. That is reflected in the block grant allocations to sparsely populated authorities, but it cannot be open-ended. That would be unfair to ratepayers and to taxpayers throughout Britain.

There remain many circumstances where children's best interests may be served by the wider opportunities available in area primary schools of a larger size. We know that after the passage of only a short time people who were originally anxious about a closure often find themselves becoming fully reconciled to it. They see their children fitting perfectly happily into their new school. They realise how much more extensive are the resources available to them. They see the benefits to their children of the stimulation provided by larger age groups, and the journey is not as bad as it looked.

Mr. Skeet

I am following my hon. Friend's arguments closely, but I am sure that he is overlooking the fact that the fabric of village life is destroyed in such circumstances. The savings for the two schools that I have mentioned are said to be £8,000 and £10,000 although I do not accept those figures. Should one not take into account also the fact that the mothers of the children involved would like to pick up their children at school rather than wait in a queue for a bus in winter weather? Should not that argument be taken into account? Are there not many other arguments, quite apart from the statistics that Ministers put forward?

Mr. Dunn

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. I was about to refer to the cases that he has mentioned.

Bedfordshire is, on what would be its own ready admission, an authority with a sizeable rural primary school problem. Almost a quarter of its primary schools have rolls of 50 or below. That is virtually double the shire county average and three times the average for counties with Bedfordshire's population density. Yet it has closed only one primary school since 1974. I accept that it takes courage for a local education authority to put forward closure proposals in the teeth of what can prove to be fierce local opposition. When it faces so formidable an exponent of his constituent's interests as my hon. Friend, it will not embark on such a course lightly.

Bedfordshire deserves some recognition for having decided to consider the problem of its small rural schools and for the manner in which it carried that consideration forward. The proposals that we are discussing tonight were among a set of 19 that Bedfordshire considered originally. However, before submitting any proposal to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State the authority embarked upon a round or extensive local consultations. As a result, it withdrew several proposals that failed to pass a stern test of local discussion, argument and debate. In so doing, the authority demonstrated that it had, in each and every case, weighed carefully the balance of educational advantages before proceeding to seek my right hon. Friend's approval for closure.

The proposals that reached the Department had several aspects in common. None of the schools had as many as 30 children on roll. Of the ones that we are considering tonight Stevington had 24, Little Staughton had 21, both Keysoe and Odell had 13 and Pavenham had a mere 5. They all had a greater or lesser extent of surplus capacity. Little Staughton had three places, Odell 17, Stevington 30, Pavenham 31 and Keysoe 37. In short, they were all costly schools to retain, which, despite the devotion of their staff, had difficulties in providing the full range of work within an appropriate primary school curriculum. Moreover, in no case was the proposed receiving school more than about two and a half miles distant from the one due to close. Having said that, I shall not pretend that all the arguments went one way. It is worth stressing hat my right hon. Friend considered each case in detail on its merits. It was on a rounded judgment on all the facts that he concluded that he should approve the authority's proposals in each of these cases.

Now that decisions have been taken—the Secretary of State acts in this matter in a quasi-judicial capacity—I must make it clear that it is not open to the Secretary of State to alter them. I am surprised that my hon. Friend should suggest that he had been given to understand that these proposals would be rejected. My right hon. Friend's function in these matters is quasi-judicial, as I have already said. He takes his decision on the proposals' individual merits, after considering with an open mind the local authority's case for its proposals, in the light of the arguments put forward by the objectors and any other factors relevant to his decision. That decision is made by issuing a letter to the proposers — in this case Bedfordshire local education authority—informing them what the decision is. Until that decision is taken and the letter issued, the matter remains open and my right hon. Friend must continue to consider it with an open mind.

Hon. Members who have brought section 12 proposals to Ministers will know that this point is almost invariably made to them. They are told that we cannot comment on what they say and can only listen carefully to them. There may have been misunderstandings, but the decision has been taken in good faith and on the merits of the case. It cannot now be altered.

It is of course within the power of the Bedfordshire local education authority to publish a further section 12 notice under the 1980 Act seeking, in effect, to delay the closure of these schools until September 1984, but I must make it clear that the power of decision on such section 12 notices is the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Education and Science and his alone.

Let me stress once again that in taking this decision none of this reflects ill on any of those concerned. I know of nothing but praise for the staff, the parents and the pupils concerned, and tribute is due to my hon. Friend the Member for Bedfordshire, North, who has shown such meticulous concern and compassion for the interests of his constituents. My hon. Friend and I must beg tc differ in our opinion of my right hon. Friend's decision in this case. Of one thing I am sure, however: all three of us have, and will continue to have, the best interests of the children in these villages very much in mind.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-seven minutes past Ten o'clock.