HC Deb 01 March 1995 vol 255 cc1011-8 1.30 pm
Mr. Bob Dunn (Dartford)

I am most grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to open an Adjournment debate on education in Kent, for it gives me the opportunity to comment on change—desirable and undesirable—in the structure, motivation, direction and philosophy in maintaining provision through the agency of Kent county council.

My right hon. and hon. Friends who represent Kent and I wish to place on record our unswerving and total support for the many hundreds of schools—local education authority-maintained and grant-maintained—in the county. We recognise fully the dedication of teachers, governors and parents who service the range and variety of schools in Kent, thus giving local parents a range of choice second to none in England and, therefore, giving Kent's children the opportunity of a first-rate education: the best start in life possible.

I am pleased to see my hon. Friends the Members for Medway (Dame P. Fenner), for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), for Gillingham (Mr. Couchman), for Graveshan-i (Mr. Arnold) and for Dover (Mr. Shaw) supporting me today. Those of us who represent Kentish constituencies have wasted no opportunity at any time to praise Kent schools, not as a matter of form, but for genuine reasons of pride and admiration.

Until recently, there was a symmetry of interests between the local education authority, schools and parents. 'That symmetry of interests and working together to improve standards in Kent has been ruthlessly destroyed by the advent of the Lib-Lab pact at county hall. It is to that regime in Maidstone that I want to direct my charges. I charge it with wilful politicisation of the education bureaucracy, a total and cynical disregard of pledged commitments made while in opposition about open government and the need for transparency and accountability, a manifestation of complete hostility to the range of national policies, which allow Kent to enjoy the variety of schools and to permit the greater involvement of parents in the running of their children's school, and financial incompetence. The Lib-Lab pact in Maidstone is trying every which way to avoid owning up to financial irresponsibility of the like never before seen in Kent at county level.

The final straw for us in Kent since the loss of control by the Conservative party in May 1993 was that, a few weeks ago, the director of education services issued under his name a leaflet paid for by the council tax payers of Kent, which contained nothing more than a political, anti-Government message. The leaflet was issued at a cost of several thousand pounds to each local education authority-maintained school in Kent. No consultation was allowed with the governing bodies of those schools, although it is said that some governors, at some meetings, asked for some information about the future budget.

Copies of the leaflet simply arrived one afternoon at local schools and the teachers, staff and heads were told to distribute them. Many chairmen of governors, not only Conservatives, have expressed great concern over the use of teaching staff to pass on to parents in our communities a clearly political message. I am glad that a number of head teachers in north-west Kent refused to send out the leaflet because they felt that it was a political message and not part of their duty and responsibility.

Mr. David Shaw (Dover)

Does my hon. Friend accept from me as a chartered accountant that the figures quoted in that leaflet were highly selective and designed solely for a political purpose? We must question the basis and the appropriateness of a director of education issuing such a leaflet under his name and whether he is able to continue to be an independent director of education, or whether he should get out of his bureaucrat's office and admit that he wants to play politics and become a politician.

Mr. Dunn

The director of education in Kent has made known on several public occasions his hostilities to the policies of this Government. I am sure that he will read with interest the comments of my hon. Friend.

With regard to the leaflet, none of us in this Chamber objects to the political masters and mistresses of lire county of Kent issuing a message if they wish to do so. What is unparalleled in my 16 years in the House is the use of the director of education for the purposes of party political activities. That is wrong. What is more interesting about that particular unfolding of events is that I was told by the chief executive of Kent county council—a professional man indeed—that he did not see the leaflet in draft form until it had gone out. That is a significant development. What is going on between the different arms of the county bureaucracy?

I am fully aware that that development is not new. All of us—I welcome my right hon. Friend the Member for Thanet, South (Mr. Aitken), the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to the debate—remember that, in the county council election campaign in April and May of 1993, neither the Labour or Liberal parties, nor any of my local Labour or Liberal Democrat candidates, made any reference whatever to their opposition to GM schools, although there was a reference to it in their manifesto kept in Maidstone. Many of them have since refused to back their local schools in ballots to become grant-maintained.

Kent council is bypassing the governing bodies, has made a commitment since 1993 to do nothing to assist in the forward movement of Government policies and, of course, as we know, last week descended into the sort of anarchy that we used to associate with central London Labour-controlled boroughs, by refusing on a number of occasions to allow members of the Conservative group on the county council to speak on important issues. That led to a walk-out by the Conservative group, which, of course, has the full support of my right hon. and hon. Friends.

What was significant about the budget debate the other day was that there was no publication of staffing levels for the years ahead. Over the past two years of Lib-Lab control, central staff numbers in Kent county council have risen from 14,694 to 15,556 persons. Thus, we are concerned about the reduction in KCC's commitments, while the level of bureaucracy has risen.

Mr. James Couchman (Gillingham)

Does my hon. Friend agree that the most shameful result of that swelling bureaucracy, as the council increased numbers of central staff, was that at the same time it was hacking savagely at three particular areas of education: discretionary grants for those over 16 years old who complete their A-levels and foundation courses at colleges of further education, travel expenses for the over-16s and the adult education service, much prized in Kent?

Mr. Dunn

My hon. Friend is right in his interpretation of those matters. Of course, there are other examples of waste, not least conferences, the Kent partnership programme, leaflets being issued, and attempts to force schools on local communities that do not want them. All hon. Members can find examples of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money being spent in Kent for quite the wrong purposes. It is the nature of the beast at county hall to want to cut high-profile services in the way that my hon. Friend mentioned.

Dame Peggy Fenner (Medway)

The matter must be set against the background of half our secondary school pupils now in grant-maintained schools, for which Kent county council will have no budget at all, of no funding for further education, which is now the responsibility of the Further Education Funding Council, and of no careers service, and yet there is an increase in staff, and of the educational core staff in Maidstone. That is set against the background of a much declining role in education budgeting.

Mr. Dunn

My hon. Friend is right. I shall quote the comments of the leader of the Conservative group, Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, who, on 23 February 1995, said: The KCC has lost much of its responsibility and role; 50 per cent. of our secondary school children are in Grant Maintained schools out of KCC control; we have lost Further Education and now Careers and Police. Despite this loss KCC has not reduced its central administration accordingly". It is Conservative Members' duty to make every school, every grant-maintained school, every grammar school, every high school and every city technology college aware of the hostility of the Lib-Lab pact on KCC. KCC is not serving the people; it is frightening the people.

Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury)

Surely one of the most shocking figures concerns the pay rises that the administrative staff have been awarded. They have totalled 7.1 per cent. over the past two years, which is 1.5 per cent. more than the teachers are receiving. Were not our Conservative colleagues on the county council right to oppose that increase?

Mr. Dunn

The Conservative group on KCC put forward its own budget proposals, which could have funded the teachers' pay increase, restored the cuts that the Lib-Lab pact has made, and given Kent the familiar robust financial competence that had existed for more than 100 years. If it is a matter of the people or of Kent county council, it is our job, duty and pleasure to back the people every time.

1.41 pm
Mr. Jacques Arnold (Gravesham)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn) on raising this important subject. I can do no better than deal with the ill-informed comments of the signatories to early-day motion 708, which was tabled last night by six hon. Members, none of whose constituency is within 100 miles of Kent. Indeed, most are in the north of England. I shall deal with their specific points.

First, the signatories claim that 1 per cent. had been provided by the Lib-Lab pact for the teachers' pay increase in Kent. What they fail to state is that, simultaneously in the education budget papers, the Lib-Lab pact cut 1 per cent. from schools' delegated budgets, thereby taking them back to zero—in other words, no increase. Only last week, the Lib-Lab pact took a leaf out of the Conservative budget proposals to fund a 1 per cent. increase by drawing down from the over-provided GM schools common formula provision.

Secondly, in my speech on 7 February, I thanked the Government for a 2 per cent. increase in Kent's external funding—that is, revenue support grant and the business rate allocation—from £754 million to £770 million for KCC and Kent police combined. The Lib-Lab pact has claimed a £5.5 million cut. It does that by bringing in other specific grants, and including one year's figures but not the next, to produce the cut that it wishes to allege. That is quite bogus.

One can do anything if one is prepared to massage figures. In fact, I could create a massive funding increase for Kent county council by adding in the windfall of £20 million that KCC has saved from lower interest rates and £10 million from land sales, £30 million of which, incidentally, it has already blown.

Thirdly, I refer to conferences. The early-day motion mentions the Great Danes conference at a four-star hotel, which cost £30,000. The signatories are very coy about the other KCC conferences, which cost the Kent council tax payer 10 times as much. The Great Danes conference was addressed by, among others, Roy Pryke, the most effective politician of the left-wing troika running Kent education, the others being the Lib-Lab co-chairs, who have been notably hiding behind Roy Pryke's skirts as the flak has rightly flown of late. Another speaker was Professor Ted Wragg, a consistent opponent of Government education policies. He has said: The free market plans in curriculum and testing will restore and extend the stigma of premature failure. Professor Wragg has also said: As the league table philosophy begins to predominate the less able will increasingly be seen as cripples. He further said: Statethink was unknown in this country until 1988. It will be the norm in future. I cannot help but think that that party political stuff, if repeated at the conference, was no help at all. It was a Lib-Lab political fun day, but it wasted vast sums of council tax payers' money.

Fourthly, the signatories to the early-day motion speak of cuts in the county council administration due to the departure of further education colleges. How do they know? As we have heard, the Lib-Lab pact has mysteriously left staffing numbers out of the budget book for the first time ever in Kent. All that we have to go on are the gross staffing numbers of the central organisation, which have risen from 14,694, when the Lib-Labs came in, to 15,556 today, an increase of 862.

In fact, as has been mentioned, with the departure of further education colleges, 88 GM schools and the careers service and with contracting out, administration costs and staff numbers should have fallen sharply. In practice, they have not. The county auditor, Price Waterhouse, has reported that This will not be sustainable. I contend that millions of pounds, which are tied up, could have gone to our school budgets.

Fifthly, the signatories to the early-day motion claim that there are £1.8 million savings in central management costs. I have looked at the details. The Lib-Lab pact claims that £600,000 will come from income generation proposals, but no details of that are revealed, and that a further £416,000 is saved from cutting contingency funding. In other words, £1 million of savings is bogus. I could even further reduce the original savings figure of £800,000.

So much for the early-day motion. My hon. Friends from Kent, in early-day motion 710, were right: the Lib-Lab Members' arguments are as remote to Kent as they are to their own constituencies.

Mr. David Shaw

On the point that there were no staffing numbers included in the budgets that were put before Kent county council, is my hon. Friend aware that the council's accounts since the Lib-Labs have taken over have not been signed off by the auditors and that a number of people have raised questions about those accounts? Is he further aware that the accounts contain no information about directors' remuneration or the chief executive's remuneration? We live in an age of openness, supposedly, and the Labour party is trying to encourage openness, but much information about the levels of staffing and bureaucracy in Kent is not available.

May I finally put to my hon. Friend the point that grant-maintained—

Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes)

Order. That intervention was quite long enough.

Mr. Arnold

My hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mr. Shaw) seems to make the point that the Lib-Lab pact councillors do not have a clue about how to run a vast organisation. We are talking about our children's education and an organisation that has a turnover of more than £1 billion a year.

The debate has the elements of a tragedy. The Lib-Lab pact has underfunded our schools, slashed adult education, and hit discretionary grants, school transport and the youth service. It is all so unnecessary. I cannot make up my mind whether it is due to the breathtaking incompetence of the Lib-Lab pact or political malice to incite ill-informed Government-bashing. It is probably both.

In a cavalier fashion, the Lib-Labs first tried to gag the Conservative KCC alternative budget, then they voted it down. That budget would have fully funded teachers' pay, protected the schools budget, and reversed cuts in adult education and the other services that I mentioned. Why can Conservatives on the county council do that? It is because they, the Conservative county councillors, have years of experience in managing that vast organisation. They have produced a realistic budget with the front line as the priority. It is a tragedy, because education in Kent has been making so much progress. In 88 schools, parents and governors have already opted to become grant-maintained, and I shall cite three rapid examples.

St. George's comprehensive school in my constituency has a chairman of governors, Joe King, who is a Labour party supporter. But in his enthusiasm for grant-maintained status, he said: GM schools are so much cleaner and tidier looking". He has also said that extra money is available because schools do not have to support central services and can buy what they need, and that the culture is not dependency based, but results from the self-confidence that comes from recruiting a good team and enabling it to seek the best for the school in its central task of teaching and learning.

The Northfleet school for boys is in the strongest Labour ward in Kent, yet John Hassett, its headmaster, has said: The freedom from KCC petty interference, and its politicians in Maidstone, who have far less awareness of local needs and of our pupils, has allowed this school to set its own local strategy—we are now a real community school". The results for that high school have improved so that 20 per cent., rather than the previous proportion of 10 per cent., achieve five grade Cs and above.

Lastly, in Southfields school, a high school with a difficult catchment area, the redeployment of resources has improved its performance so that, whereas before it became grant-maintained 1 per cent. of its pupils achieved five GCSEs and more, 8 per cent. achieved that goal last year, and the school expects the percentage to double this year.

Those educational advances are what the debate in Kent should be about. Either the Lib-Lab pact on Kent county council could not run a whelk stall or it is using the children of Kent as a party political battering ram. Which is it?

1.51 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Mr. Robin Squire)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn), who has done a service not only for his constituents but For everyone living in Kent, in drawing the attention of the House to the problems that he has identified within that county. He was eloquently backed by my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr. Arnold), who rightly took the opportunity to demolish just about every word in early-day motion 708, and also by the presence of and the interventions by my hon. Friends the Members for Dover (Mr. Shaw), for Medway (Dame P. Fenner) and for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier). [Interruption.] And, of course, by the presence of several more of my hon. Friends, including my hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham (Mr. Couchman).

I hope and trust that the wise words uttered by my hon. Friends will be widely read after the debate and will be digested by their constituents. Understandably, by taking a significant amount of time, my hon. Friends have left rather less time at my disposal, but I do not complain on that score because the quality of their contributions merited full and frank exposure.

I shall begin by commenting on the general issue uppermost in the minds of many parents and teachers—the education budget. The first aspect of education expenditure about which everyone in the House must be clear is that Kent county council, like every other local authority, is responsible for setting its own budget and for deciding its own priorities between and within services. It is the council that has the final say on how much is spent on education and how much on other services.

It has been alleged elsewhere that Kent has been forced to cut millions of pounds from its education budget for the forthcoming financial year. But there is no reason why that should happen. Kent's education standard spending assessment will increase, and under the capping rules it will be able to spend more in 1995–96 than it is spending in 1994–95. In total, Kent will be able to spend more than £955 million—nearly £1 billion—on all its services.

So where does the talk about cuts come from? The county council is not cutting what it is actually spending; it is drawing up a shopping list of additional spending, then cutting what it would ideally like to spend if it could buy all the items on the list.

I know that Kent schools, like schools in other areas, will be concerned about the teachers' pay award. The Government have accepted that award, subject to consultation, on the recommendation of the independent schoolteachers review body. The review body acknowledges the fact that financial provision has been set on the basis that pay increases should be offset or more than offset by efficiency gains and increased productivity.

Of course I acknowledge that the award will place local authority budgets under pressure. Ministers have made that clear in recent weeks, and I reiterate it from the Dispatch Box today. But local authorities are large, financially complex organisations, and they have a variety of means at their disposal to realise the efficiency gains needed.

To draw a fairly obvious parallel, the Government expect the Further Education Funding Council to make efficiency gains of 5 per cent. over the coming year. That will be tough but we are confident that the council will make it, and we are entitled to look to local authorities to examine their budgets in a similar way and to learn to live within them, prioritising appropriately.

Schools and parents will want to ask the county council other important questions. How much of its total budget does the county intend to spend on education? What proportion of its schools budget will it delegate to schools? I shall not bandy comparative figures about, because that would be tantamount to telling the council exactly what it should do. But I can say that it has some way to go to catch up with what many local education authorities are already doing on both those fronts. Governors are entitled to look to local authorities to give priority to front-line services such as schools, and I hope and trust that Kent county council will do that.

My hon. Friends, especially my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham, moved on to the general question of grant-maintained schools. As he is well aware, devolving power to institutions is one of the central themes of our education reforms. Our commitment to devolution is not the product of ideology or of some esoteric theory but is based on the commonsense principle that giving more power to managers who are closer to the customers is likely to produce a better service.

Mr. David Shaw

While he is talking about the devolution of power, and the way that that can happen with grant-maintained schools, will my hon. Friend congratulate St. Edmund's school in Dover, which opted out of Kent county council control, became grant-maintained and has now increased the number of its teaching assistant staff by six to provide more teachers in the classroom? It needed no additional resources to do that.

Mr. Squire

My hon. Friend has graphically, in one sentence, explained precisely the sort of reason why grant-maintained schools are so popular. Of course I join him in congratulating that school and many other grant-maintained schools, especially in Kent, where the concept of self-government has taken off so strongly. As has already been said, half the secondary schools in Kent are now self-governing.

The aims of our policy on grant-maintained schools are clear. They are to raise education standards in GM schools—

Mr. David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside)

What about all the rest?

Mr. Squire

I hear what the Opposition education spokesman, who has just joined us, says—but another of our aims is to encourage LEAs to be more responsive to the needs of the schools that they continue to control. For both those aims, the signs are promising.

It is clear that the grant-maintained option, combined with local management, has prompted LEAs to switch from a control to a support mode. There is also clear evidence that GM schools are achieving better results than their LEA counterparts and, not surprisingly, that they are popular with parents.

Sadly, ever since the change of control in Kent county council, the LEA has made it clear that it does not support the policy of encouraging grant-maintained schools, selective schools or city technology colleges. I understand that Kent has decided to freeze building maintenance, other than essential health and safety work, for schools that are balloting parents on GM status. If that is so, it is unjust. GM status is aimed at extending choice for parents and allowing them to decide on the way in which their schools should be managed. It is morally wrong that when they are offered that choice, their school is discriminated against, especially when it is the pupils who suffer.

Perhaps there is some confusion in the minds of the members of the Lib-Lab pact in Kent. Two weeks ago, the Daily Express reported that the leader of the Labour party was studying plans to allow all state schools to opt out of council control. I have news for the leader of the Labour party, which I am willing to give today, free of charge. That plan is unnecessary—the opportunity already exists. If the Labour party could, in the words of Lord Wilson, "take their tanks" off the lawns of schools up and down the country whose only crime is wanting to run themselves, there would be a large increase in the number of grant-maintained schools. That would be popular with parents and with teachers. It would also be popular with a growing number of Labour and Liberal Democrat activists, including Members of Parliament. My hon. Friend made a passing reference—

Madam Deputy Speaker

Order.