§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Lang.]
10.13 pm§ Mr. Robin Squire (Hornchurch)It is difficult to describe my feelings, having waited — with my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State — for this magic moment, and heard en passant that apart from a sitting in 1936 this is the longest sitting that the House of Commons has had since 1881.
I welcome the presence of my hon. Friends the Members for Twickenham (Mr. Jessel) and Richmond and Barnes (Mr. Hanley). They represent areas with outstanding examples of adult education centres — indeed those places are a byword for that. I welcome too, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway), whose work in adult education, as the chairman of the all-party committee, is well known.
As one or two hon. Members know, my wife is, as they say, active in this sphere, and a voluntary member elected to the national body of the Educational Centres Association. That is not a declaration of a financial interest but of a financial cost. However, that has allowed me to attend half a dozen conferences of the ECA, as I shall henceforth refer to it. It has given me not merely a theoretical knowledge of its activities but a practical grounding in them.
The ECA was formed in 1921 to promote adult education through participation. It is unique in offering a forum for all engaged in adult education, especially in the local education authority sector, to engage in a partnership promoting learning opportunities for adults through a participatory structure involving administrators, teachers, both full and part-time, and, above all, the students. A network of communicating centres, sharing their experiences, provides a training ground both for professional staff and student members of the centres to work closely within and for their local communities. This training comes through the conferences and seminars organised by the association where knowledgeable and experienced people share their skills and initiatives with others on a wide variety of topics. I cannot list them all, but they include adult basic education, adult unemployment, education for the handicapped, pre-retirement education, technological innovation, new initiatives in language teaching and many, many more. Over 400,000 such students within 150 centres have a voice in national affairs through their membership of the ECA.
On 6 March my hon. Friend answered a question of mine and it revealed that the grant to the ECA was scheduled to be reduced and, indeed, eliminated. That was confirmed in a letter dated 14 March to the ECA from the Department of Education and Science. It is a long letter and I do not propose to detain the House by reading it at length. In essence, it confirmed that the existing grant of £18,000 would be phased out from 1985–86 until it stopped completely in March 1988. Six criteria were advanced in the letter for accepting an association as eligible for grant aid.
I make it clear that not only does the ECA accept in full the validity of those six criteria but submits, humbly or otherwise, that it complies in full with them. The letter states:
I submit that those who know the ECA would not argue that those three criteria were not met by it.
- "(i) it is national and either unique or, by general consent, regarded as a major body in its field
1223 - (ii) it is concerned to foster adult education through its members or affiliates
- (iii) specific adult education objectives can be identified which justify DES funding".
(iv) its aims and activities are non-party political".I am tempted to ask, what is "non-party political"? However, having attended numerous conferences I can confirm to my hon. Friend that some of its members, for some obscure reasons, do not share our political views, but perhaps in time they will. However, many of its members do share them and an organisation that recently elected as its vice-chairman a serving sergeant in the police force is probably demonstrating its resistence to Marxist-Leninist influences. The letter continues:(v) it has an organisation capable of stimulating or supporting new educational developments".That is most important and perhaps it is the key point in all the criteria because, without conforming to that, a genuine question mark would be raised over the organisation. It continues:(vi) there is real need for financial assistance.I shall deal with the matter of financial assistance first. Within the past year the ECA has benefited by £63,000 from a legacy of the late Professor Allaway. After making appropriate calculations, I hope that that may provide an annual income of some £6,000. I am not absolutely sure whether the Department is questioning the grant because of the existence of the legacy or, in a sense, because there was no legacy and insufficient funding without it, so I shall examine each alternative.If it is the case that without that legacy insufficient funding was raised by the ECA, I point out, making realistic projections, that the ECA could expect to raise some £12,500 or £13,000 in today's money, being both investment income and membership income. Its expenditure will be some £32,000, which is predominantly the cost of a full-time secretary and back-up facilities.
The gap is fairly obvious, and it is met in the main by the existing grant of £18,000. Only that grant keeps the ECA going in its present form. A recent written reply showed that in each of the last three years the grant had, none the less, been cut by 6 per cent., 11 per cent. and 15 per cent. in real terms. If it was to be suggested in some way that the legacy might remove the requirement for the Department to support it, I would counsel caution. A letter from Mr. Denis Rice, who is the warden of the Department of Adult Education at the University of Leicester states:
I am writing not just as an ECA member, but as a colleague of the late Professor Allaway for 21 years and as trustee of his estate.I am sure that I write for my fellow trustee when I say that I am most disturbed by the coincidence of the ECA losing its (relatively) small annual grant at the same time as it receives Professor Allaway's legacy. I hope you can impress on the DES the unfortunate impression that this can convey and the disincentive to public-spirited people to give legacies to voluntary bodies.Five years ago, with the express agreement of the Department of Education and Science, a permanent secretary was appointed with no suggestion at that time that the grant from the DES was in the nature of a pump-priming exercise. Since then, 50 new centres have been added to the ECA's activities. Whilst some 24 have been lost, the majority of those have been as a result of local authority reorganisation, and a large minority because the 1224 centres themselves could not afford the cost of membership of the ECA, which includes conferences attendance.For example, a small centre which may seek to send one person to two conferences a year, and to pay the subscription which has to be drawn from the centre would in present-day sums need to find £150 to £200 a year. At precisely the same time that centre is under enormous pressure to devote that sum of money to this, that or the other locally required need, equipment or whatever for its centre. That is the competition that paying a subscription to the ECA faces.
Any suggestion that in some way the money that would be lost from the DES grant could be found by increasing subscription has to come up against the reality that that would need a triple or quadruple increase in subscriptions, with the inevitable result that many centres would withdraw from the ECA. The centres that would withdraw would be the smaller and poorer ones, which would be the very centres in most need of learning how best practice could be implemented. That is the vicious circle in which we may find ourselves.
I could have quoted from many letters I have received on the subject, and I am sure that the House will be relieved to know that I am quoting only from one. It is to my hon. Friend the Member for Torridge and Devon, West (Sir P. Mills) from the Bideford school and community college. It states:
This College is left in a curious position in that our work with the unemployed was greatly helped in its initial stages by other centres in the ECA, notably in South Wales and in Bristol. From those contacts, we have been able to develop our work in a more imaginative way. At the same time, our budget is so constricted that we have had to abandon our literacy provision (one of the largest schemes in rural Devon), and I suspect that it will not survive on a voluntary basis until the new DES plans materialize. … Yet, just … where we most need contact with other centres, our only link with them is threatened by this withdrawal of grant.We have found our membership of ECA a useful link to the outside world: our students attend ECA conferences regularly, largely at their own expense, or subsidised by funds raised by students. Through the conferences and the regular ECA mailings, we have learned first hand of developments in other places, many of which we have been able to adapt for local use. Of recent years, our ECA membership has provided more training of student representatives than the Education Authority has been able to offer. Any reduction in ECA services is bound to lead in time to a deterioration in the quality of the local Adult Education service.That letter is signed by Nigel Melville, the adult tutor.In his answer to me on 6 March my hon. Friend said:
Officials have discussed grant with the ECA, which has only one quarter of the membership of education centres. The association's objectives are insufficiently central to the Department's main concerns to merit a continuation of current pump-priming grant. A phased reduction will be made over three years".—[Official Report, 6 March 1984; Vol. 55, c. 721.]Leaving aside the strange coincidence that most of the most active and forward-looking centres in adult education happen to be members of the ECA, let me give my hon. Friend one practical example of its value. On 5 March he announced a £2.5 million programme to improve education opportunities for unemployed adults by identifying and developing good practice to meet their specific needs—exactly the role of the ECA. Today—that is, now, yesterday—the ECA received all the back-up information, dated February 1984. On inquiring the reason for the long delay, it was told that the DES had been unable to locate a mailing list, and had at last resorted to the ECA centres listed in the National Institute for Adult 1225 and Continuing Education year book. Was that material not central to the Department's main concerns? Without the ECA the Department would be reduced to sending batches of letters to local education authorities and hoping that they would reach the right destination.My final argument is about the future educational role of the ECA. I see that as the critical element. Centres receive money from their local education authorities to make provision for adult education. The guiding principle used by most education authorities is that classes should break even or be self-supporting. That has led to changes in most centres' programmes to ensure that popular high fee-raising classes are given the most prominence. Such classes often form the basis of criticism from councillors about "tap dancing on the rates". The provision of highly funded MSC courses for young adults completes the imbalance of general provision to which most centres are driven, but which then attracts both Government and local authority members' censure.
The ECA uses its influence with its member centres to establish balanced programmes, in which provision is made for all types of participant, including those said to be of special concern to the Government — the unemployed, the impoverished elderly and those in need of basic education. It does that by establishing what is good practice in its centres, through its national, regional and local conferences, and through its reports and research programmes, such as that recently conducted on participation.
It is interesting to note that the £2.5 million initiative for the unemployed includes a projected salaries and expenses sum of £400,000 for the appointment of seven to nine field officers whose responsibility will be to try to establish what is good practice. Those officers will have no network of centres to tap—except the ECA—and will have to establish one before any suitable comparisons can begin to be made. That will take a considerable amount of time, money and expertise. The ECA's salaries and expenses bill of under £20,000 looks especially high value compared with the proposed spending of £400,000. The ECA has in addition the ready-made contact with a quarter of both centres and students—some 400,000 in all.
For all those reasons and many more, I urge my hon. Friend to review his decision now, before any damage is done and before 150 nation-wide centres and numerous others who are sympathetic start organising themselves in a co-ordinated protest.
There is no educational, political or common sense in further reducing, let alone eliminating, the grant. The grant is a classic example of the way in which funding advanced to voluntary bodies can create a framework of volunteer services of infinite value to the community. It should be continued. We, as Conservatives supporting the principle of self-help, should not reject it. I urge my hon. Friend to think again.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mr. Peter Brooke)Every night of doubt and sorrow always contains a pilgrim band, but I take particular pride in having shared this one with my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Squire), my colleague in Wales, the Minister of State, and my other hon. Friends who have reached this promised land and 1226 stayed to listen to the debate. Congratulations in such debates are common place, but they are particularly well deserved tonight.
I welcome the opportunity to respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and to give the Government's reasons for taking the decision to cease funding the Educational Centres Association.
At the risk of going over again some of the ground which as already been covered I should like to establish the context in which this decision was taken. For many years the Department has made grants to a wide range of bodies engaged in providing educational services. About a dozen of these national associations have been in the area of adult education. As long ago as 1981 we decided to undertake a review of the grants to these bodies, all paid under what is now regulation 19 of the 1983 (Education) Grant Regulations. We are concerned with grants towards the administrative expenses of bodies providing educational services. That regulation is not concerned with grants towards putting on courses. The issue of grant to the EMDs and WEA districts is therefore a quite separate matter.
The thinking behind the review, was straightforward. About £300,000 of scarce adult education resources were tied up year in, year out, without any systematic reassessment of the level of grants or, indeed, of the relevance of grant aid to the Government's priorities at the time. I want to emphasise that point to establish that reviews of priorities for grant will in future be regular and rigorous.
We needed to consider whether the grants effectively helped to increase adult education opportunities. Were we getting good value for money? Were the objectives of the associations those to which the Government attached priority? If, within limited funds, we were to avoid stagnation, promote efficiency and support attempts to respond to changing educational needs, we needed to be clear on our criteria for grant aid, where appropriate, and adjust the pattern of grants accordingly. This was the basis on which we proceeded. Each organisation was asked for a statement of its circumstances and current plans. The ECA responded to this request, as, of course, did every other national association. The submissions were tested against the criteria for grant aid which had been drawn up. Departmental officials had meetings with national officers of several of the national associations, including those of the ECA, in 1982. Final decisions on the grants were those set against the Department's wider strategy for adult and continuing education and the Government's priorities within that. As my hon. Friend said, we finally announced the decisions taken in a series of letters to all the associations concerned in March and April of this year. The ECA itself was forewarned as a matter of courtesy at a meeting with officials on 1 March.
The letters that we sent out detailed the criteria for accepting an association as eligible for grant. My hon. Friend gave them in his speech and I shall not repeat them, but I should like to give the three financial provisions that he did not quote. The first is that an association can raise a substantial proportion of the income needed to run it from sources other than the DES and on that basis appears financially secure. Secondly, base grant should be reviewed annually in the light of alternative sources of income and be reduced to the minimum compatible with achieving its approved objectives. Additional short-term 1227 grants might be available for particular programmes in specified priority areas—for example, provision for the educationally disadvantaged.
I assure my hon. Friend that Professor Allaway's legacy, although I welcome it, has not affected the Department's decision, which arose from a review two years in the making.
Our key criterion, so far as the ECA is concerned, is whether specific adult education objectives can be identified which justify DES funding. The objectives of the ECA were spelt out in their initial submission to the Department. They were to secure
the provision of adult education on the basis of democratic management by students and staff, with help from professional guidance, in adequate and appropriate premises contributory to an active communal life 'Democratic Management' implies decision making about the scope and content of the education provided and sharing in finding and allocating resources for centres including those directly funded by Local Authorities".As instances of its concern with the quantity and quality of education available to adults, the association stated:in present circumstances the Association has been active in defence of Centres threatened with closure or impotence because of unrealistic fee increases. It is closely involved in the work of the 'Save Adult Education' Committee and in the encouragement of parliamentary debate".I put it to my hon. Friend that in any pecking order of claims on central Government funds these aims and objectives cannot be placed at the absolute forefront. The underlying objective of departmental grants to the headquarters of national voluntary associations is to help stimulate the growth of adult education opportunities through their members and affiliates which, in the ordinary run of things, might play little or no part in adult education provision. The great majority of the centres in membership of the ECA already receive public funds for making adult education provision through their funding bodies, largely the LEAs, and it is to these that they must look for increased support.The size of the grant to ECA, therefore, does not directly affect the number of courses and classes provided. Its primary concern is with the process and form of that education—the democratic, participatory model that has been mentioned tonight. This is a legitimate approach for the ECA to take, but it must follow those aims as a pressure group freed from the trammels of DES grant. At a time of considerable constraints on public funds generally finding a pressure group of this kind cannot be a priority for central Government. As I emphasised last week at the annual conference of the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit, Government policy is about getting right the balance between competing needs and priorities. At the moment we are increasing support to ALBSU and the Professional, Industrial and Commercial Updating programme—PICKUP. We have launched this year a new programme designed to improve the response of the education service to the needs of the unemployed, as my hon. Friend said, and set up a development unit in the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education. These are all examples of initiatives relating to real and urgent needs. We are continuing to support adult liberal education provided by the university extra-mural departments and the WEA districts, albeit at a slightly lower level of departmental grant, together with the work of the long-term residential colleges. The total sum of money being spent on adult education will be increased significantly and 1228 it will be more sharply focused to produce real improvements in the range and scope of adult education provision.
There is one other perspective that I think is relevant. The ECA is seen in some quarters as providing a valuable forum for adult education interests. I know that the ECA has been active in running conferences and spreading ideas of benefit to the service as a whole, but I must point out that the Department is already funding the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education to the tune of £81,000 a year to act as a national focus. It has been doing so for decades. Moreover, traditionally, local authority associations have largely matched the resources that we have put in. In other words, there is no need for the ECA, with at most one full-time member of staff, to adopt the wider function that some of our critics appear to assume is needed. At the same time that we announced our decision on ECA funding, we confirmed our intention to continue to grant aid the national institute in its important focal point.
A criticism made in some quarters is that the decision to withdraw grant to the ECA reflects a lack of support for the voluntary sector. That simply does not stand up to scrutiny. As I have explained, the ECA's membership comprises in the main, LEA adult education centres. In the past two years we have offered grant aid to three new national associations, the affiliates of which are solidly in the voluntary sector—the Pre-Retirement Association, the National Federation of Community Organisations and the National Housewives Register. We welcome the valuable contribution of voluntary bodies in making more adult education opportunities available. That is why we are continuing to fund national associations in total at about the same level as before.
In view of the comments made earlier in the debate, I think that I should make it clear that the ECA has received its present higher level of grant only during the past five years. In 1979 an increase was allowed which enabled the association to appoint a full-time secretary. It was not envisaged that this essentially pump-priming support would be extended indefinitely. Unfortunately, the hoped for increase in subscription income from members did not materialise and the ECA has become proportionately highly dependent on Department support. Subscription income was about £4,800 in 1982–83 and is forecast to be £5,700 in 1983–84—less than one third of the amount of DES grant in either year.
As will have been gathered from the criteria that my hon. Friend read out, our grant is normally dependent on potential self-sufficiency. It has been and continues to be the Government's wish to make the transition to self-sufficiency on the part of the ECA as smooth as possible. We are continuing to fund the association at current levels until September 1985. The grant thereafter will be determined in the light of the detailed income and expenditure projections, but we plan to make appropriate sums available, on a reducing basis, until March 1988. I very much hope that full use will be made of this long transitional period to plan carefully for the longer term.
Government policy has been to take a long hard look at the way in which the Department's adult education budget is spent, with a view to ensuring that grant is allocated as effectively as possible in line with our priorities and achieves the best possible outcome. No review worth the name could simply perpetuate in every detail the old pattern of grants. Inevitably there are some 1229 who do not benefit from such a review, and I have explained at some length the thinking which has underlain our decision in the ECA's grant. It is, however, indicative of our commitment to and concern for the health of adult education that the outcome of our wide-ranging look at expenditure has been an increase in the adult education budget from £12.9 million last year to a planned total of £15.8 million in 1985–86—an increase of 22.5 per cent. in two years. I would argue strongly that our approach of concentrating on the highest priorities is creating more adult education opportunities in the areas where they are most needed. This is the best use of resources available to us.
My hon. Friend has been patient throughout the night and eloquent in what he has said. I do not want remotely to encourage him into thinking that even a single brick of 1230 the walls of Jericho is about to fall. He has heard my arguments. However, at the end of this long day, I promise to re-examine the matter and to write to him again shortly. I hope that he will take that offer in the spirit in which it is made.
§ Mr. Archy Kirkwood (Roxburgh and Berwickshire)On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. As this is the longest sitting of the House since the war—it has lasted about 32½ hours—is it not a time-honoured tradition for the last hon. Member to speak to treat the remaining hon. Members to at least a salvatory Tea Room mug of coffee?
§ Mr. SpeakerThat is a very good idea, but unhappily I shall not be able to join the hon. Gentleman.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at seventeen minutes to Eleven o'clock on Wednesday 23 May 1984.