Grant-Maintained Schools (Hansard, 5 July 1995)

§ Mrs. Angela Knight (Erewash)
I am grateful for this opportunity to debate the future of grant-maintained schools and to enliven this calm and quiet week. I am also grateful to my hon. Friends who have torn themselves away from speculation and their telephones to join me this morning.
With more than 1,000 grant-maintained schools across the country, some 500,000 pupils attending them, and one in five secondary schools gaining GM status, the GM sector is undoubtedly a principal player in education.
The good news is that parents have been voting with their feet and sending their children to grant-maintained schools. The bad news is that, too often, a dirty fight has ensued when a school has chosen to go grant-maintained. I do not object to a battle in which people put forward the arguments, but I object to battles in which Labour party members in particular employ a series of scare tactics and untrue statements.
There have been a great many examples of such battles—there were two in my constituency which were not particularly horrendous, but which I found very disquieting, as did the parents involved. The first example arose when a Catholic school decided to ballot for grant-maintained status, and a Labour politician went round telling the parents that GM status was against their religion. That is the sort of statement that one should not make to a Catholic.

§ Mr. Peter Atkinson (Hexham)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on the honour that has been bestowed upon her. Did she notice that the Annunciator said that she was Dame J. Knight?

§ Mrs. Knight
Since I am not wearing my glasses this morning, could my hon. Friend tell me whether it is now correct?

§ Mr. Atkinson
indicated assent.

§ Mrs. Knight
Thank you very much.
The second example in my constituency occurred when two schools in Long Eaton decided to ballot for grant-maintained status. There was a ferocious anti-grant-maintained campaign run by a lady who described herself as "just a concerned parent". She called her campaign SOLES: Save Our Long Eaton Schools— 296 from what, I have no idea. Misinformation abounded; those who were in favour felt themselves unable to put their heads above the parapet, and the ballots were lost.
Only a few months later, that so-called concerned parent turned up as a Labour party activist, then a Labour councillor and then on the shortlist for selection as the Labour party candidate in Erewash for the next general election. What was wrong with her declaring her credentials in the first place? If she had wanted a clean fight, she could have had it. She fought a dirty campaign to sway parents. It was misleading, misinformed and wrong.
Those two examples, although minor, have been mirrored across the country. The real purpose of a school becoming self-governing is to enhance its ability to serve the people who really matter: the pupils. A school may serve its pupils by having control over all its budget, and using it in the interests of the children and the school.
As the head of Shennington primary school in Oxfordshire—a recent opt-out—said: If a school does decide to become GM the reason should not be money. A school should do it for the freedom because it wants complete control". That is quite right. Interestingly, when the head of Baverstock school—an early opt-out—was recently interviewed, he said: We quickly discovered by handling our own budget, which came direct from Whitehall, we could buy materials and fuel at up to half the price that the council could supply them. Today we have … brand-new classrooms … And instead of having to cut teachers we actually have more staff than the local authority would have allowed. By having entire control of their budgets, GM schools have achieved such good results, yet too many Opposition Members have overtly and covertly campaigned against GM status.

§ Mr. David Jamieson (Plymouth, Devonport)
Does the hon. Lady agree that some of the schools which opted out early on have been able to provide some extra staff and some extra facilities because of double funding, which was opposed by the Public Accounts Committee two years ago? Is it not true that £1 extra for a grant-maintained school is £1 less for a local education authority school?

§ Mrs. Knight
The hon. Gentleman and his friends have tramped that argument all over the place for many years. If it is true, why does he not go home and tell all the schools in his constituency to opt out? If he alleges that GM schools get more money, in their best interests he should tell all schools to opt out and obtain that extra money. I also urge the hon. Gentleman to look at a more general survey of teachers, which was conducted in the past few months.
Three quarters of teachers in GM schools said that their class sizes had not increased, whereas the majority of teachers in LEA schools said that they had. Of those in grant-maintained schools, 90 per cent. said that in-service training was good and special needs provision had improved. An overwhelming majority did not want grant-maintained schools to be abolished. That is a very important survey, revealing interesting results.
There is great interest in GM status: it is a big issue, and grant-maintained schools deserve a secure future. I suggest three ways in which to help secure their future, which I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Schools will take on board.
First, the grant-maintained schools need to know that there is no possibility of local education authority control returning. They need financial security for the future, and 297 they need to plan for more than one year ahead. They need to have an assurance that their budget will no longer be fixed by the LEA's decision about its schools budget. The common funding formula addresses that point to a certain extent, but there are areas that do not have a common funding formula, as the trigger threshold has not been reached.

§ Mr. Patrick McLoughlin (West Derbyshire)
I fully support what my hon. Friend has just said. Does she agree that one of the strange ironies of grant-maintained schools is that, although they have become grant-maintained to be free of local education authority control, their funding is, unfortunately, still in some ways controlled by local education authorities, whose interests are not in the grant-maintained sector?

§ Mrs. Knight
I agree entirely. What is happening with too many schools is that the global purse strings are still held by the LEA—the organisation from which the school has opted out. That is an anomaly which I should like to see addressed.
The second area that needs further consideration is more general. There are considerable differences in the amounts spent per pupil in different areas. We all accept that differences arise, but in some instances, the differences are worryingly large. One reason, of which I and my hon. Friends who represent Derbyshire constituencies are aware, is the way in which the LEA decides to allocate its money.
From the latest figures I have obtained from the House of Commons Library, it is clear not only that Derbyshire allocates less than the average of its education budget to the general schools budget, but that the authority is one of the worst delegators in the country in terms of money diminishing as it filters down through the potential schools budget to the aggregate schools budget. Yet it is the aggregate schools budget that equates with the money that gets into the classroom.
Let us take three similar counties in terms of standard spending assessments: Derbyshire, Suffolk and North Yorkshire. One finds that, in terms of the aggregate school budget per pupil, Derbyshire gives £200 less than the other two counties. That means that the authority is not getting money where it is needed—in the classroom.
An aspect over which authorities have no control is the area cost adjustment. As a result of the ACA, about £100 more per primary school pupil and about £200 more per secondary school pupil is aggregated into the SSAs of the 12 south-eastern counties. Although extra costs are recognised, those large sums, distributed on an all-or-nothing basis, are difficult to justify.
There is merit in ensuring that future area cost adjustments do not have those large discrepancies. I also believe that there is merit in looking at a common funding formula for all schools in the country. Those points are easy to make, but the difficulty is getting from A to B. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister, however, to look at my suggestions.

§ Mr. Nigel Spearing (Newham, South)
On the area cost adjustment, does the hon. Lady realise that the discrepancy is as great or even greater for maintained schools in local authorities? There is a difference of several hundred pounds between the per head expenditure 298 in primary and secondary schools of Newham and Tower Hamlets, both very needy east London boroughs, because of the arbitrariness of the current ACA formula. Does the hon. Lady realise that funding for nursery schools, of which the SSA does not take proper account, automatically reduces the per capita amount for locally managed schools? There are lots of things wrong with the present formula.

§ Mrs. Knight
To a certain extent, I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Clearly, I cannot talk about the situation in London, because Erewash is not a London constituency. However, I point out to the hon. Gentleman that the SSAs are made up of a series of hugely complicated items. That is why I would like there to be a common funding formula for all schools which would be easy to understand. I would like to ensure that the schools get more money than they do at present, and that far less money is held back as, sadly, is the case with too many LEAs.
The third way in which to secure the future of grant-maintained schools is better use of the private finance initiative. "PFI" is not a particularly sexy-sounding trio of letters, but it is an initiative that can be useful to grant-maintained schools. It means that they do not have to wait for public money to carry out the repairs or to build the extensions they need; they can do such work much earlier. We all recognise that many school buildings that were thrown up in the 1960s are in a sorry state of repair.
I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to look again at the PFI. At present, the rules are complicated and the procedures are not very clear to anyone. They have only just been circulated to governing bodies.
Ockbrook Redhill, a school in my constituency, spent considerable time and effort trying to determine whether its proposals were acceptable in principle under the PFI scheme, and on getting the nooks and crannies right. For the PFI to be a useable option, the rules need to be simple, understandable, easy to get going and quick; those are the essential ingredients for a scheme that will be an extremely important route for grant-maintained schools. I should like my hon. Friend the Minister to look at those three points, which would improve and secure the future of grant-maintained schools.
The possibility of an insecure future lies elsewhere. In December, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett), the shadow Secretary of State for Education, wrote a secret letter to Labour Members. It began, "Dear Colleague", and was headed, "Urgent—GM Schools". It was the sort of message that one gets in Herge's "Adventures of Tintin", which my children watch avidly on television. The letter continued: We are opposed to schools opting out and remain committed to the white paper pledge to bring such schools back … I thought it would be helpful for you to know that there has been no change of policy in relation to events in the last few days. After 200 days had passed, lo and behold, there were considerable changes to the policy. What else did the hon. Member for Brightside say in December? He said: There is no plan to have a paper on GM schools, nor is there any intention that GM status should continue. Let us see what happened.
A Labour party policy document turned up, warmly entitled "Diversity and Excellence—a New Partnership for Schools". It talks about grant-maintained schools on just about every page. I understand the Labour party's 299 problem, because, when the Leader of the Opposition chose to send his son to a grant-maintained school, as did one or two of his colleagues, he not only pulled the rug out from underneath the shadow Secretary of State for Education and 90 per cent. of the parliamentary party, but took the floor away.
The party was left with two questions which it had to answer. The first was how to reconcile the irreconcilable in a new policy document, and the second was how to pass off the new policy as both changed and unchanged. That is probably why the Labour party has had more changes of mind on its education policy than there are steps in the hokey-cokey; I doubt whether it has finished that dance yet.
So we have this document, "Diversity and Excellence—A New Partnership for Schools", which has been referred to as the sort of soft-sell slogan that possesses all the meaningless charm of a detergent commercial. I wish that I had thought of that myself. In fact, the person who wrote those words was the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley), the former deputy leader of the Labour party.
In December, this document was not going to happen. Although it was not going to mention grant-maintained schools, it in fact uses the words "grant-maintained" on just about every page.
When the document is not talking about grant-maintained schools, it is talking about fairness—fair this, fair that, fair funding, fairness to parents and fair admissions. Presumably all the teachers will be instructed to mark "fair" against every entry in pupils' reports. When the word "fair" is used as extensively as it is in that document, there is more than a fair chance that it is covering up more than its fair share of rubbish. It is worth examining Labour policy a bit more closely, and for real.
Independent grant-maintained schools are not compelled to have politicians on their governing bodies, but the Labour party would force them to include two councillors. We can all imagine which two would be chosen. Secondly, grant-maintained schools receive resources directly from the Funding Agency for Schools, which is also independent. The Labour party would abolish that. In view of the amount of money now being held back from schools by local education authorities, how much would the schools get if the money for grant-maintained schools were directed no longer through the independent funding agency but through LEAs? A lot less than they do now.
The document then says: We will set a new national target of 90 per cent. of the school's budget to be delegated from LEAs to the schools". If that is what the Labour party believes, why does it not ring up all its Labour-controlled local education authorities now, and tell them to delegate 90 per cent. of the education money to schools tomorrow? The Labour party has not done that, and its real policy has been to hold back as much money as possible in LEAs, not to give it out to schools.
Even if 90 per cent. of the money went to schools, that would mean that a secondary school with a budget of £1.5 million would have £150,000 taken away, and a primary school with a budget of £200,000 would have £20,000 taken away. Teachers would have to be taken out of those schools. That is what the Labour policy really means when one translates it out of the fudge in which it is written.
300 The Labour party would also interfere in the way in which schools are run. Independent grant-maintained schools are now allowed to apply to the Secretary of State for permission if they wish to expand, but Labour would make them apply to their LEA. That would mean that a popular school would not be allowed to expand. We should return to the same fudge that happened when popular schools were penalised in an attempt to force parents to send their children to schools to which they did not want to send them.
The language in the document is different from what we have seen before; it is a fudged language that has shimmied around one or two edges to please the Islington chatterati. None the less, the document is as great a threat to grant-maintained schools as any previous Labour proposal.
The debate is about grant-maintained schools, but I emphasise the fact that, whether schools are grant-maintained, voluntary, run by the local education authority or independent, they are equally important, equally valued and equally distinctive in their own way. I always hope one day to see the return of direct grant schools, in which I was educated as a child, which were abolished when the Labour party was in control. All types of schools are important, and in the programme of education reform, the watchword must be stability.
We must continually ask what schools, teachers and parents want. Parents want high standards. They want to get the best out of their children. They want good English, good grammar and a decent grounding in maths, and they want their children to know their historical and geographical place in the world. That is easy to say but hard to produce, but we are currently achieving it.
survey of 500 grant-maintained schools whose results were published recently in The Times Educational Supplement showed that the huge majority of schools were in no doubt about the advantages of going grant maintained. Ninety-two per cent. had appointed more staff, a similar percentage had increased spending on books and equipment, and they were achieving consistently good exam results and attendance rates. That is what parents are looking for.

§ Mr. Don Foster (Bath)
The hon. Lady has just listed all the advantages of grant-maintained schools. Can she tell the House whether there is any hard evidence that, as a result of those advantages, standards have been levered up?

§ Mrs. Knight
In 1993, 41 per cent. of 15-year-olds in grant-maintained comprehensive schools achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A to C compared with 36 per cent. in LEA-controlled schools. So schools in the grant-maintained sector are producing better grades for pupils than were achieved under LEAs. [Interruption.] Whether Opposition Members like it or not, that is the case.

§ Ms Estelle Morris (Birmingham, Yardley)
The hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) asked whether the schools had improved, given the extra funding that they gain from their grant-maintained status. It is no good giving us raw figures for examination passes. The hon. Member for Bath is right; there is no evidence that standards have improved. That is the key question, given the amount of resources that have been put into those schools.

§ Mrs. Knight
I appreciate that nothing will convince the hon. Lady and her hon. Friends, because of their constant hostility to grant-maintained schools. In fact, I have not heard her express any genuine interest in standards.
301 Parents want their children to be taught well, and to get good grades in their examinations and a good start in the world. In practice, they are voting with their feet and sending their children to grant-maintained schools because they know that that is what they will get. There are now 1.3 million parents with children in grant-maintained schools. Those schools are popular with parents, and they are here to stay. We need to recognise that and to secure their future—and we need to abolish proposals such as those of the Labour party.

§ Mr. David Jamieson (Plymouth, Devonport)
The speech by the hon. Member for Erewash (Mrs. Knight) was interesting, but packed with inaccuracies and false statements. The fundamental flaw in Conservative policy in recent years has been its concentration on the education of the few rather than of the many. Over many years in this country, we have been successful in educating very well indeed the brightest and the best, but we have failed to educate those in the next group down. We have failed to educate the mass of the people to high standards.
Grant-maintained schools were created to destroy local education authorities. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the debate has been peppered with denigration of the work of LEAs and of locally elected councils in general. The former Secretary of State for Education, the right hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Mr. Patten), lost no opportunity to attack local education authorities throughout the country.
As the Conservatives have lost more and more seats on local councils, until they have only a tiny rump of councillors left, their desperation has increased to grasp back control of schools. Essentially, grant-maintained status has nationalised schools and put them under state control.
The hon. Member for Erewash and I served on the Standing Committee on the Education Act 1993—for nearly 180 hours, I believe. At every stage, nearly every clause gave the Secretary of State for Education more and more direct powers over grant-maintained schools, so they are no longer locally accountable.
Grant-maintained schools join other failed enterprises such as city technology colleges, which were supposed to spread across the country raising standards. We have seen what has happened to many of them. One, in Birmingham, had lower standards in technology, mathematics and science than the local comprehensive school.
So much for jacking up standards. We heard in a debate the other day that just 32,000 pupils were involved in the assisted places scheme, but they received twice as much funding as children in LEA schools.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Mr. Robin Squire)
I intervene briefly, as I suspect that discussion of city technology colleges at great length would be rightly ruled out of order by you, Madam Speaker. The hon. Gentleman makes his point in the shadow of last week's announcement that we have reached 100 schools which are either CTCs or technology colleges, the latter being built substantially upon the success of CTCs.

§ Mr. Jamieson
The Minister has not answered the question. I made the point that the 15 CTCs have had 302 highly preferable funding, yet have not proved that that funding has led to improved standards in the schools. Perhaps the Minister can give evidence later that standards have increased as a result of the extra funding that CTCs have received.
I have no argument with the teachers, parents or pupils in grant-maintained schools, but the system is failing. There are three main areas where I object to grant-maintained schools. First, the early opt-outs received considerable extra funding. The hon. Member for Erewash glossed over the point I put to her in an intervention, and did not answer it. If she looks at the 9 June edition of The Times Educational Supplement, she will see the headline "MPs defied over £40m bonus for GM schools".
If the hon. Lady reads the Public Accounts Committee report published on 19 January 1994, she will see that the Committee recommended that the Department for Education progressively withdrew from existing grant-maintained schools the excess funding of central services, with a view to that funding being removed completely within two years. An all-party report made that recommendation, which is being totally ignored by the Government. They say that they may rule out the double funding by 1999.

§ Mr. Robin Squire
indicated dissent.

§ Mr. Jamieson
The Minister shakes his head, as if to say that the Government will not rule out the double funding at all.
A small primary school in Tower Hamlets has found that it receives £200,000 extra funding because it is grant-maintained. My point is that every pound extra received by a grant-maintained school is a pound that is not received by a LEA school. The hon. Lady made the point that grant-maintained schools have kept their class sizes as they were, while class sizes had increased in LEA schools. I am glad that she accepts that class sizes have increased in LEA schools, but that must be because funding is being withdrawn from the LEA schools and put into grant-maintained schools.
On capital, the hon. Lady may want to refer to evidence received by the Department for Education on the capital funding of grant-maintained schools. The figures clearly show that, two years ago, grant-maintained schools were receiving three times as much per pupil in capital spending as LEA schools. That extra funding is just a cheap political bribe. Schools and parents do not want to opt out. The hon. Lady failed to tell the House how few schools had opted out last year, or that the majority of ballots were now resulting in no votes. Some ballots in my county are producing a very substantial no vote.
My second objection to grant-maintained status was touched on by the hon. Lady, who said that grant-maintained schools had far more control over their own affairs. I have no problem with schools having internal control of the running of their day-to-day business. That is right and proper, and I have always said in the Chamber that I support the local management of schools. Such local management has given autonomy to individual schools.
A self-perpetuating coterie of governors that has formed in grant-maintained schools has the power of decision-making about the admissions policy of schools. We have discovered in parts of London and in other parts of the country that admissions policies arranged by governing bodies sometimes deny local children—who 303 live in what used to be the catchment area of a school—a place in that school. The decisions are being made solely by the governors of the school. It is not right that a small unelected group is able to make that decision.

§ Mr. Squire
I am trying not to interrupt the hon. Gentleman's flow, but this is an opportunity to correct two of the misstatements that he is making. First, 66 per cent. of ballots on grant-maintained status this year have recorded yes votes, so one of his statements has been shot down in flames. Secondly—as he well knows—every admissions policy that is proposed by grant-maintained schools must be approved by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. It is simply not the case that grant-maintained schools can change their admission policies willy-nilly.

§ Mr. Jamieson
I am pleased that the Minister has confirmed my earlier point that admissions policies are in the hands of the governors, and can only be ratified by the Secretary of State for Education. Local people who have been elected to sit on councils have no say in the policy at all. The governing bodies make a decision that is rubber-stamped by the Secretary of State. In other words, we have a quasi-nationalised education admissions policy.

§ Mr. Spearing
These debates allow a constructive shooting match to take place. Does my hon. Friend agree that a fundamental flaw in the grant-maintained system is that schools are not seen as possessions of the community, area or town they serve, but only of the parents or potential parents of the day? Do not such schools reflect the divisive education structure that this country tried to get rid of in the middle of the last century, and reflect also the aspirations, social background and financial resources of different groups within society?

§ Mr. Jamieson
That is exactly my point. The school ceases to be the property of the local community, and becomes the property of an individual governing body that will serve its own interests. That is the total antithesis of the choice which the hon. Lady and so many Government Front-Bench Members talk about. What is happening in many grant-maintained schools is that the school is choosing the pupils rather than the pupils choosing the school.
I turn now to my third main objection. The hon. Lady is wrong to say that the money provided to the Funding Agency for Schools is coming out of LEA budgets. The money is moving in a circle, from the LEA to the Funding Agency for Schools—a quango in York—and back to the grant-maintained schools. As most of that money is raised locally, it should be accountable locally through the councils.
The money moving in the circle through the LEAs and the agency and back to the schools is producing another layer of bureaucracy and wasteful inefficiency into the system. The Funding Agency for Schools alone is costing £11 million to run. That £11 million is not going to schools to provide more books, teachers or services, but is providing jobs for people shuffling paper in York.
Those are my objections to grant-maintained schools. There is no upsurge of desire in this country for schools to become grant-maintained, and parents are now deciding to stay with LEAs. Later today, a report by the Education 304 Select Committee will be published which raises many important issues to do with the important role of LEAs in the running of schools.
I noticed that the hon. Member for Erewash mentioned LEAs only in a derisory manner. She attacked her own LEA, even though it is running the schools and the education system for children in her constituency. If she looks at that report, she will see that Members of Parliament have recognised, on a cross-party basis, that local authorities have a powerful role to play in running schools, and that they are needed to ensure accountability and the success of our schools.
The hon. Member for Erewash failed to say what would happen should a grant-maintained school start to spiral downwards and fail. That has manifestly happened to some of them, just as it has to certain local education authority schools. In the case of such schools, the LEA steps in to provide assistance. In the most extreme circumstances, it can send in an education association—that weapon has not yet been used by the Department for Education.
What happens when things go wrong in a grant-maintained school? Who will oversee the education of those children when the governors degenerate into a squabbling mass, like those at the school in Stratford? In such circumstances, the school is referred back to the Secretary of State for Education. There is no local accountability, and no local body able to provide assistance.
This useful debate, albeit a brief one, has enabled me to set out my views on grant-maintained schools and why I oppose them. My party will continue to advocate changes to them, which are designed to deliver fair funding and proper accountability.

§ Mr. Patrick McLoughlin (West Derbyshire)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Mrs. Knight) on securing this important debate. It has exposed the fallacy that somehow the Labour party has changed its mind on grant-maintained schools.
I wish that the Labour party could be consistent. The hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg) served with me on the Committee considering the Education Reform Act 1988, which set up grant-maintained schools. The current shadow Home Secretary was then Opposition spokesman on education, and I was left in no doubt about his vehement opposition to grant-maintained schools.
The right hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Ashdown) was then the education spokesman for the Liberal party. His venom against such schools was plain for all to see, and was expressed in speeches that were officially recorded. I note that the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) is nodding his head, so I assume that that venom against grant-maintained schools is still apparent in the Liberal party.
I support the concept of grant-maintained schools, because it has offered diversity of choice in state education. Those who are wealthy are able to send their children to the private school of their choice. Before the introduction of grant-maintained schools, those without such wealth had to leave that choice to the local education authority, which directed where children should be sent. There was no choice in the state system, because it lay with the LEA.
My one great pleasure is that the grant-maintained system has introduced diversity of choice to the state education system. That should be embraced and 305 welcomed. The Labour party may argue that fewer schools are opting to become grant-maintained. I do not believe that the figures prove that, but should that be so, I am sure it is due to schools' uncertainty about the future.
Schools are unclear whether the Labour party will follow its leader, who has taken advantage of the grant-maintained system. I suppose he is one of those middle-class people about whom the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) used to talk so much. Certainly, if my wife was a leading barrister, I might be even be middle-class.
Although the grant-maintained system has delivered essential diversity of choice, it is high time we introduced a national funding formula for education, because far too much confusion is caused by the different amounts of money held by education authorities and their various expenditure. It has taken me some time to obtain a breakdown of the relevant figures, but they are revealing.
For example, according to its 1994–95 central budget, Staffordshire, which has a total pupil number of 159,000, spent £2,975,000 on management. Derbyshire, with 84,000 pupils, spent £3,787,000 on management. That is a great difference.
I recently tabled a question To ask the Secretary of State for Education if she will list in ascending order the difference between income and expenditure for school meal services for all counties over the last seven years."— [Official Report, 7 June 1995; Vol. 261, c. 208.] I was surprised by the answer from my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Schools. It revealed that Derbyshire county council had spent £115 million on subsiding school meals, whereas Lancashire, the next closest on the table provided, had spent £94 million—a £20 million difference. Those differences become more apparent when one considers that Lincolnshire, a Conservative-controlled council, spent just £11 million in those seven years on subsidising school meals.
I do not mind that local education authorities should be able to decide to spend that money, but that expenditure should be open to scrutiny. If an authority is spending money on subsidising school meals, it is clear that it is not available to be spent on other education services. The expenditure may be simple and straightforward, but too many of the relevant figures are hidden, and the purpose of that expenditure is not easily identified.

§ Mr. Peter Kilfoyle (Liverpool, Walton)
The hon. Gentleman will recall from a previous debate that, for 9 per cent. of children, the only hot meal they get in the course of a day is the subsidised school dinner provided by local education authorities. Is he suggesting that needy children should be deprived of that hot meal, which they would otherwise not get?

§ Mr. McLoughlin
No. I am not suggesting anything, I am simply revealing figures and facts—Lincolnshire spent £11 million on subsidising school meals, whereas Derbyshire spent £115 million. I accept that a comparison between Lincolnshire and Derbyshire is not a good one, but it is worth comparing Staffordshire and Derbyshire, which are roughly the same size.
In those seven years, Staffordshire spent £47 million on subsidising school meals, which is still £60 million short of that spent by Derbyshire. The hon. Member for 306 Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) must accept that a lot could be done with that £60 million. I accept that education authorities decide what they want to spend their money on. The county breakdown and the differentials revealed by my hon. Friend's answer were, however, extremely interesting.
The other great benefit of grant-maintained schools—I plead with the Opposition to think carefully about it—is that they have made LEAs act more responsibly, because there is now an alternative available to parents. When I entered the House in 1986, the sixth form of Ecclesbourne school, in my constituency, was under threat of closure, because the LEA wanted to close all sixth forms in the centre of Derby and replace them with a tertiary system of education.
The school launched a massive campaign to save its sixth form, which was supported by all the parents. The LEA's proposal was sent to the Secretary of State for consideration. After a very vigorous campaign, I am glad to say that the Secretary of State rejected the proposal to close the sixth form.
I attended a public meeting at Ecclesbourne school at which one governor said, "I believe that the school should keep its sixth form, but because I am a socialist—and the county council's socialist—I must do what the county council wants me to do". County councils and local education authorities can no longer impose their views upon schools quite so easily, because schools now have an alternative.
I turn to the suggestion that somehow grant-maintained schools are unaccountable. A sad but true fact is that the voter turnout at local government elections averages about 40 per cent. The voter turnout when a school ballots to become grant-maintained is usually more than 70 or 80 per cent. Parents who are involved in the school and in the community want to ensure that there is a good grant-maintained schools system in place for their children.

§ Mr. Gerry Steinberg (City of Durham)
Does the hon. Gentleman think that it is democratic that parents can vote to take a school out of the local education system and into the grant-maintained system for ever? Under the present rules, there is no way that a school can ballot to re-enter the local education system. The hon. Gentleman is saying that parents who send their children to a primary feeder school will have no choice whatsoever about whether their children should attend a grant-maintained school. They have no option because that decision has been taken for them. Is that accountability?

§ Mr. McLoughlin
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. We spent many long hours taking the legislation through Committee when my right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Mr. Baker) was Secretary of State for Education. The hon. Gentleman misses the point entirely. If he had his way, parents would have no choice at all. They would be forced to send their children to LEA schools, and the local education authority would determine the admissions policy, irrespective of parents' wishes.
Parents now have a choice. If they do not wish to send their children to grant-maintained schools, they do not have to do so. Parents can be certain that grant-maintained schools will remain, and that we will continue to have the diversity and choice in the state education system that I have talked about and believe in passionately only by ensuring that the party in government supports the grant-maintained policy.
307 Unlike Labour Members, the Conservatives do not mouth one thing and then another because a senior party member chooses to take advantage of the grant-maintained system. I will give way to the hon. Gentleman once more, but I am conscious that time is short.

§ Mr. Steinberg
I wish that the hon. Gentleman would be honest with the House and with the country. The majority of parents, whether they send their children to grant-maintained or local education authority schools, have absolutely no choice in the matter. The majority of schools choose the children who attend those schools. Parents who live in certain catchment areas have no choice but to send their children to the nearest school. It is the schools and the local education authorities which allow parents to send their children to those schools. It is a misnomer to say that parents have any choice; they do not. Will the hon. Gentleman please be honest with the House and with the country?

§ Mr. McLoughlin
If the hon. Gentleman does not believe that choice exists, he should take up the matter with the Leader of the Opposition, who has exercised that choice, as have a good many Members on the Labour Front Bench. The Labour party is displaying grand hypocrisy on the issue. I have asked questions about grant-maintained schools in the past.

§ Mr. Don Foster
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. McLoughlin
I will not give way, as time is short. The number of admissions to grant-maintained schools has increased. Schools that were threatened with closure by local education authorities have gone grant-maintained, and they have flourished. They are run by the local community, and they are part of the local community. They provide a diversity of choice in education.
The Labour party would offer a choice only to those people who could afford to go to the private system. The Government believe that every parent should be able to choose what kind of school their children will attend. There is a choice in the state system: between the local education authority schools and those that are independently grant-maintained but part of the state education system.

§ Mr. Kilfoyle
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. McLoughlin
Time is short, or I would give way willingly—although the hon. Gentleman has a bad record for giving way when he is at the Dispatch Box.
That is why I am passionately committed to grant-maintained schools, the grant-maintained sector and the state education sector. The element of choice that we have introduced into the education system has also brought many of the loony local education authorities under control. Before we introduced the grant-maintained system, schools had no escape route; they had nowhere to go. Schools now have an alternative to being run by local education authorities; as a consequence, those authorities have become more responsible. All hon. Members should welcome that development.

§ Mr. Don Foster (Bath)
I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Erewash (Mrs. Knight) on securing the debate. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, I agreed entirely with one or two of her remarks, to which I shall return in a moment.
308 Of course, I disagreed entirely with a number of her comments—not least the paeans of praise that she heaped upon the grant-maintained schools sector. She seemed to suggest that the Government's grant-maintained policy has proved a tremendous success. However, anyone who has examined the figures will know only too well that it has not been a success—indeed, it is an ailing policy that has failed almost completely.
Towards the end of her remarks, the hon. Lady referred to the 1.3 million parents whose children attend grant-maintained schools. She failed to point out that fewer than 50 per cent. of those parents voted in favour of grant-maintained status. It is worth recording that only 500,000 people in this country voted for grant-maintained status, and that very few people are currently voting for grant-maintained status. The number of ballots for grant-maintained status has declined markedly, and the number of schools that opt out of the local education sector has also decreased significantly.

§ Ms Estelle Morris
Many parents did not vote to opt out in many local areas. In some schools that have been opted out for four or five years, none of the parents whose children currently attend the schools exercised their vote, because their children did not attend the schools at the time the ballot was taken. Is that not even more despicable than the figures cited by the hon. Gentleman?

§ Mr. Foster
The hon. Lady is absolutely correct. She also draws attention to the welcome remarks of the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg), who pointed out that the grant-maintained system is not the system of democratic choice that the Government would have us believe.
It is perhaps worth recording the figures for opting out. From Easter 1994 to Easter this year, there have been only 48 secondary school ballots, and only 13 schools voted to go grant-maintained. That compares with 171 ballots in the previous year, when 107 schools voted to opt out. There has been a similar decline in the number of primary school ballots.
As the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson) said, the grant-maintained policy has failed, despite the many bribes that the Government have offered. The Government have promised to phase out double funding gradually, but it is interesting to note that, in the process, a number of grant-maintained schools will receive additional money this year for the first time. I suspect that many local education authority schools will be pleased with such phasing out, despite the various bribes in respect of capital funding.
Grant-maintained schools are a failed policy in terms of the number of people voting for it and its ability to lever up standards. The hon. Member for Erewash was unable to answer when I asked her whether, despite all the financial advantages that had been given to grant-maintained schools, there was any hard evidence that standards had been levered up. The Minister is now about to give us some figures.

§ Mr. Robin Squire
It would be invidious to run down a list of schools, but the hon. Gentleman will remember, as will the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Ms Morris), who is about to speak from the Labour Front Bench, that the evidence from Baverstock school—the solid accounts of achievement and its turnaround from a 309 school that was failing in virtually every respect to what we now have—has been attributed by the head overwhelmingly to its grant-maintained status.

§ Mr. Foster
If the Minister can cite only one school, that is extremely worrying. We can swap school for school, and I could start talking about Stratford school, for example.
However, if we look at the base starting point for grant-maintained schools, taking into account the number of children with free school meals and the selective nature of many grant-maintained schools and we then look at the examination results, the SAT figures or anything else, we realise that there is no clear evidence that all that additional support—the uneven playing field provided for grant-maintained schools—has led to a levering up of standards.
The hon. Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin) said—I have forgotten his precise words—that Liberal Democrats totally hated grant-maintained schools. When I nodded to him, he implied that I accepted what he said. I should like to put it clearly on record that we dislike not the schools, but their grant-maintained status and the two-tier education system which has grown up because some schools have that status.

§ Mr. McLoughlin
As we understand there is a coming together between the Liberal party and the Labour party, would part of that be an undertaking to abolish the system of grant-maintained schools?

§ Mr. Foster
I was about to answer that point. Having criticised the two-tier system that grant-maintained schools have introduced, it is important that I make it absolutely clear where my party stands.
We have a simple policy. We would bring grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges back into a light-touch strategic planning framework of the LEA, which would be responsible for the fair allocation of resources, establishing the pupil admission procedure, sorting out such issues as special educational needs, and determining, for example, whether a school needs to close or a new school needs to open. The LEA would also be responsible for issues relating to quality monitoring and levering up standards, and would have a role to play in the arbitration of disputes. Individual schools would decide which LEA services they wished to provide.
We believe that all schools in Britain should be given maximum freedom to make decisions that affect their own day-to-day running. Our approach does not pander to old-style corporatist, centralist, domineering local education authorities; it is a system that frees up individual schools within a local, democratically accountable, strategic planning framework.

§ Ms Estelle Morris
Can the hon. Gentleman confirm that his party's policies would continue to allow some schools 100 per cent. delegated funding?

§ Mr. Foster
The hon. Lady uses 100 per cent., and her document uses 90 per cent. Those figures do not make sense without identifying the base line. We are saying that some money would be retained at the LEA level to fund the various functions that the LEA would carry out.
I agree with the hon. Member for Erewash about Labour party policy. At least the hon. Lady, the Minister and the hon. Member for West Derbyshire have a clear 310 policy. They would like the continuation of grant-maintained status, and they have introduced legislation to force every school to consider it on an annual basis; and, if possible, they will continue to make as many arrangements as possible to help grant-maintained schools to become established.
My party is also clear about where it stands. We would bring grant-maintained schools back into a light-touch LEA strategic planning framework. The hon. Member for Erewash was absolutely right to point out that the Labour party now has a totally fudged policy that satisfies nobody. Despite all the efforts of its spin doctors, the Labour party is unable to convince schools in the grant-maintained sector that it is now being nicer to them; nor can it convince Labour activists, many of them with roots in local government, that Labour has not gone soft on grant-maintained schools.
The big anomaly in the Labour party's proposal is that, having totally opposed grant-maintained status and undertaken to bring those schools into the local strategic framework, Labour now says that schools that opted out will be allowed to continue their special status as foundation schools. They will have a different governing body and composition, and they will be able to retain access to their own assets by way of a trust. That makes nonsense of the ability of local education authorities to plan properly and strategically.

§ Mr. Kilfoyle
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Foster
I shall happily give way to hon. Member. I hope that, in the intervention that he is about to make, he will remind the House of what he said in the House on 9 December last year: One of the problems with GM schools is that they increasingly complicate the sort of strategic provision that needs to be made."—[Official Report, 9 December 1994; Vol. 251, c. 542.] Will not the Labour party's latest fudge proposal make that strategic planning almost impossible?

§ Mr. Kilfoyle
It is obvious that the hon. Gentleman has not read the document in question. We made it absolutely clear that schools choose from the three categories that we have designated in our paper on the local democratic framework. The hon. Gentleman's final point concerned strategic planning and admissions policy. If he looks at appendix 3 of "Diversity and Excellence", he will see that it is carefully spelt out.
The hon. Gentleman made much play of underlining the clarity of the Government's view, particularly in terms of the 100 per cent. delegation that they would afford to grant-maintained schools, but he failed to address the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Ms Morris) on the implications of the Liberal Democrat proposal, which in theory would allow every school to opt for 100 per cent. delegation of the ASB.

§ Mr. Foster
With respect, the hon. Gentleman is talking absolute nonsense. I have just explained that, if the LEA is carrying out some central functions, funds need to be retained to pay for them. That is clearly set out in our document.
The hon. Gentleman fails to recognise that his party is trying to put a precise, specific figure of 90 per cent. on it. That is nonsense, because the central services that are needed vary from one LEA to another. For example, the 311 costs of transport in a rural area differ from those in an urban area. The hon. Member cannot have it both ways, but that is what his document "Diversity and Excellence" tries to do.
The hon. Gentleman was as critical as I was when the Government brought out their document "Choice and Diversity". We used to jokingly call it, "Chaos and Confusion". I believe that the Labour party's document is "Chaos and Confusion—the sequel".

§ Ms Estelle Morris (Birmingham, Yardley)
The Opposition welcome the chance to debate what has often been called a Government flagship policy. This has been an interesting opportunity to try to shed some light on why that flagship policy has gone so badly wrong.
It was the former Secretary of State for Education who said, on Second Reading of the 1993 Education Bill, that he was setting in place a new framework for primary and secondary schools that will endure well into the next century."—[Official Report, 9 November 1992; Vol. 213, c. 627.] He went on to predict that, by April of last year, there would be 1,500 grant-maintained schools. He could not have been more wrong. Seven years after GM status was introduced, only 5.6 per cent. of all schools have chosen to go that way. Only 16 schools in Wales have GM status, and 28 local authorities throughout England and Wales still have no GM schools at all. No one—not even the most optimistic Government supporter—can possibly claim that, numerically speaking, the policy has been a success.
The hon. Member for Erewash (Mrs. Knight) has a cheek to come to this House and try to give us the impression that schools are still queuing up to opt out. Every prediction made by the Government has proved false; every target that they have set for GM opt-outs has been missed.
We could just dismiss GM status as a failed policy, had the consequences and costs for all schools and for all pupils not been so serious. In its first year of operation, £11 million was spent by the Funding Agency for Schools; 261 officials administer GM schools from York; 77 more officials help to administer GM schools from Sanctuary Buildings. Almost £1 million—£800,000 in fact—has been spent on the Grant-Maintained Schools Foundation.
All this amounts to millions of pounds spent, not on reducing class sizes or on putting more equipment and resources into schools, not on the £4 billion school buildings maintenance backlog, but on administering a bureaucracy that merely duplicates the work being done by local education authorities.
Wasteful though that is, what people find most offensive about the financial aspect of GM schools is the way in which schools that do not choose GM status are deliberately discriminated against. Why should not children attending schools whose governing bodies and parents have decided to stay in partnership with local authorities get the same funding? It is not just the £25 million that has been lost to locally maintained schools through double funding: it is the 2.7 times more spent on capital projects in GM schools which causes such harm.
It is all very well for the hon. Member for Erewash to say that schools which want the money can just opt out, whereupon they will be given it. The hon. Lady is parliamentary private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—

§ Mr. Robin Squire
As of this moment.

§ Ms Morris
Indeed. Still, I wonder what he would say if he knew that the hon. Lady wants every school in the country to opt out so as to get additional resources. That would mean that the national pot of money spent on education would have to grow—but it has never done that under this Government. As more GM schools have come into existence, the amount of extra money given to them has steadily decreased. If all schools opted out, they would, of course, not be funded at the enhanced rate given to the first opt-out schools.

§ Mr. McLoughlin
The fact is that the amount of money spent on education has substantially increased under this Government. The reductions took place between 1974 and 1979. The figures since then show a steady, consistent increase on the money spent on education.

§ Ms Morris
Why does no one believe the hon. Gentleman? Why do parents not believe him? Because their children are in classes with more than 30 pupils. Why do teachers not believe him? Because they are being asked to do their job without the necessary resources. The hon. Gentleman might believe what he says, but he and his colleagues are probably the last people left in the country who think that way.
What sort of message does the Minister think he is sending to children and parents when he seems to value one child, in financial terms, more than he does another? No one except the Government—not parents associations, not local authority associations, not, to their great credit, even GM schools themselves—continues to defend this sort of inequity of funding. As our Public Accounts Committee said, it is unacceptable.
Unacceptable though the financial arrangements for GM schools are, the greatest damage is the damage that has been done to the local partnerships in which schools operate. The whole GM notion was based on the belief that schools and parents shared Tory Ministers' dislike of locally elected education authorities. On Second Reading of the 1993 Education Bill, the then Under-Secretary of State found himself unable to make a single positive statement about local authorities. He showed no inkling of understanding of the good that local authorities can achieve.
What Conservative Ministers have never understood, but what parents and schools have always understood, is the fact that, to succeed, a school needs not just to compete but to co-operate. To succeed, it needs to share ideas. It needs to learn from others. To succeed, it needs quality information about its performance and its targets. It must pool its resources so that important areas such as special needs, music and sport can flourish.
Schools, in short, do not exist as separate competing units. They need strong, stable local partnerships, and good local education authorities can provide them.

§ Mrs. Angela Knight
As the hon. Lady is so obviously against GM schools and in favour of LEA schools, will she urge her leader to send his son to an LEA school instead of a GM one?

§ Ms Morris
I am not against GM schools: I am in favour of all schools that raise standards for their children. I am not here to criticise schools, teachers or pupils. I welcome high standards in every school, no matter what 313 its status. Parents base their decision about where to send their children on a number of aspects. The leader of my party would have sent his child to the school in question whether or not it had grant-maintained status.
The Government's whole approach has been divisive. It is no good Conservative Members such as the hon. Member for Erewash complaining about the alleged behaviour of some local councillors. I do not condone bad behaviour by councillors on either side of the political divide, but the Government have a lot of gall, given that Ministers have approached GM status in a way that meant that a divisive mess was bound to ensue. We warned the Government that their approach would lead to divisions and bitterness, but they took no notice.
The Government talk about choice, but they have failed to offer schools different but equally valued options. The Government have been so committed to the GM option that they have almost made enemies of those who did not follow in their wake.
Conservative Members of Parliament have campaigned hard on every opt-out ballot, so that they can come here and wear each new opt-out in their constituencies as a badge of pride. Time and again, they have stood up during education questions and asked Ministers whether they welcome the decision of a school in one of their constituencies to go grant-maintained. Certainly every Labour councillor has campaigned hard against GM status ballots, because not to do so would have threatened the status of other schools in their areas.
This is no way to run schools; but the legislation was framed in such a way that it was inevitable that these problems would follow. We have wasted valuable money, time and ideas talking about structures, when the real issue facing us is how to raise standards.
We must end the divisions and the turmoil of the past 15 years. Our task is to rebuild partnerships and restore trust. We can do that only if we move forward and stop looking back; if we listen and learn from what we hear; and if we seek change through consensus. That is what Labour does in its paper "Diversity and Excellence: a New Partnership for Schools".
It has been interesting today to see which side of the Tory divide Conservative Members put themselves on. Do they belong to the category who try to tell us that we have changed our minds on GM schools and will keep them? Or do they belong to that brand of Tory who tries to tell us that we, the Labour party, have it in for GM schools? Within three days, the Prime Minister has said one thing and the Secretary of State for Education another.
We shall offer schools a choice within a framework that strengthens crucial local partnerships. We shall ensure that funding is fair and open. Labour accountability will exist locally, to parents in the community, as well as nationally, to central Government. Parents will know that admission procedures will be fair, with no return to selection through the 11-plus. Above all, schools will know that they are responsible for managing themselves, and that local authorities are there to support them in raising standards.
A notion much favoured by Ministers is that local authorities control schools. That control vanished with the introduction of local management of schools. Schools control themselves, but local Labour education authorities 314 throughout the country are showing a new role for LEAs that involves raising and monitoring standards and supporting schools in their vital task of improving the performance of their pupils.
Labour will root all schools in that locally accountable and supportive partnership. It will offer them the choice of being community, foundation or aided schools. We shall preserve the best of the changes, which is independence for schools. But we shall restore local accountability, which has been so badly damaged.
A debate about a failing Government policy has been useful, but we, the Opposition, look forward to our agenda, which will focus on success.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Mr. Robin Squire)
In the time available to me, I shall try to cover as many points as possible. The House will understand that I do not have a significant amount of time.
I begin by echoing the congratulations that have come from both sides of the House to my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Mrs. Knight) on the splendid way in which she opened the debate. It was a typically rumbustious speech. She was backed by my hon. Friend the Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin). My hon. Friends are a credit to their county. I listened with great interest to their contributions.
Inevitably, the debate has generated heat as well as light. That, perhaps, is scarcely surprising. Every one of our education reforms has aroused hostility within the Opposition parties. The grant-maintained initiative has probably ruffled more feathers than most others. The reason is simple. Opposition Members belatedly pay lip service to parental preference and to school diversity and autonomy, but they do not really believe in them. Yet putting these ideals into practice is precisely what self-government is all about.
Only six years ago, local authorities had a monopoly of state schooling. We do not need a PhD in economics to know that monopolies rarely serve the best interests of the consumer. The GM initiative broke that monopoly. It gave parents a high-quality alternative to local education authority schools within the state sector. It also gave parents a direct and decisive say in the future of their children's schools.
Five years ago, there were only 30 GM schools. There are now well over 1,000 in the primary, secondary and special sectors, and the number continues to grow. Incidentally, whenever a percentage is quoted by Opposition Members, they never tell us that, at secondary level, after only six years, one in five of all secondary school children is at a GM school. That is some progress.

§ Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover)
Not in Bolsover.

§ Mr. Squire
The hon. Gentleman says from a sedentary position—he kindly joined us nine minutes ago—"Not in Bolsover." That is Bolsover's loss.
There is no mystery about the rapid growth of the GM sector. It has taken place because self-government is good for schools, pupils and parents. In other words, it works. Self-government gives a school control of its total budget, not only the portion that is delegated by the LEA. Some of the additional funding is used to buy services that were previously provided free by the LEA.
315 But GM schools have freedom to shop around and get better value for money. That means that most GM schools have money left over to pay for additional staff, books and equipment. These are important practical benefits of GM status, which pupils, teachers and parents can see and feel. But there is much more to self-government than that.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash said, self-government is about being in control of one's own destiny. It is about getting rid of dual controls and the back-seat driver. A self-governing school is free to preserve and develop its existing character. These freedoms, combined with total control of resources, give GM schools much greater responsibility to respond to the needs and aspirations of the communities that they serve. They do so without getting bogged down in the mire of LEA policies and procedures.
We know that GM schools are popular with parents. That echoes and enlarges what my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash said in response to an intervention. For three successive years, GM comprehensive schools have, on average, achieved better GCSE results than their LEA counterpart comprehensives. We know that GM primary schools achieved better results than LEA primary schools in last year's key stage 1 tests. So the GM sector is flourishing as well as growing. It is a clear example of a successful initiative that has attracted interest throughout the world.
I believe that, in due course, all maintained schools will be run on GM lines—indeed, not only maintained schools. The Education Act 1993 extended opportunities to independent promoters to propose the establishment of new GM schools. I am delighted to say that we have given approval in principle today to the first of such proposals, from St. Anselm's Roman Catholic college for boys and Upton Hall Roman Catholic convent school for girls, both in Wirral. They will be the first independent schools to come in from the new route. I look forward to welcoming them to the GM sector.
I shall deal briefly with Labour's plans. We did not hear too much about them from the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Ms Morris) when she summed up on behalf of the Opposition.
What is the Labour party's response to the success of GM? Anyone who read the press reports of a fortnight ago might well think that the Labour party is now supportive of the policy. The hon. Lady rightly confirms that, throughout the country, Labour councillors and Labour Members are opposing GM schools wherever there is a ballot, but she says that, in theory, they are supportive of GM schools. That is an interesting policy combination.
The detail behind the policy document tells a rather different story. Behind that public relations facade—the exciting talk about new relationships, partnership and trust—is a much duller reality. The Labour party proposes only three types of barely distinguishable state school. It assumes that most GM schools will become foundation schools. Some have seen this as a U-turn on the GM issue. 316 In fact, it is nothing of the kind. Foundation schools would hold their own premises and employ their own staff, but voluntary aided schools do that now, and they are not self-governing.
The essence of self-government is a school's ability to control its total budget, and to manage its own development without LEA interference. Foundation schools would have neither of those characteristics. All three categories of school proposed by Labour—the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) highlighted this—would have up to 10 per cent. of their budget held back by the LEA. All three would have LEA representatives on their governing bodies. As my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash said, we can imagine the nature of one, if not both, of the councillors who would turn up on the governing bodies. At least one of them would be ideologically opposed to the schools' very existence.
All three types of school would have to negotiate their admission policies with the LEA. Again, all three would be subject to an LEA planning regime. So all three would, in slightly varying degrees, be LEA-controlled. Labour proposals for the GM sector boil down to the abolition of self-government.
Labour has invented the O-turn; an elaborate manoeuvre which leaves it facing in exactly the same direction as it has always faced. Labour's policy remains what it has always been: to return GM schools to LEA control. Although it is easy to accuse the Labour party of malice in this respect, its policy could even be the result of simple ignorance.
It is not too long ago that a Labour Member, whose name I shall protect, said during an informal discussion with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that he could not possibly support GM schools, because at heart he did not agree with fee paying. Is that the level of knowledge of the Labour party? For those who have not followed, there is no fee paying in GM schools. I make that clear in case there any other hon. Member thinks there is.
There is insufficient time to reply to the very wise and detailed comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash on funding. I assure her that we will continue to look carefully at the national funding formula. She has heard me say before from the Dispatch Box that there are some problems in that respect. I assure her that we are considering the matter with the best will in the world.
The hon. Member for Bath spoke of a policy that had failed. He should ask the grant-maintained schools about it; he should visit them. Labour Members can contemplate visits only when armed with a cross and clove of garlic, but I would have hoped that Liberal Democrat Members might visit the schools. If they did, they would find that the schools, far from having failed, are popular and successful.
We are grateful to the hon. Member for Bath for having affirmed his party's continuing outright opposition—

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Geoffrey Lofthouse)
Order. We must now move to the next debate.