§ 11. Mr. Jon Owen JonesTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment what steps she is taking to assist primary schools with the recruitment of specialist staff to assist with the delivery of the national curriculum. [14686]
§ Mr. PaiceThe Government have invested more than £4 million on training specialist teacher assistants during the past two years and we plan to invest a further £3.5 million over the next two years.
Specialist teacher assistants help qualified teachers to give primary pupils a good grounding in the core national curriculum skills of reading, writing and arithmetic.
§ Mr. JonesI welcome that amount of support, but does not the Minister believe that the chief inspector's report on primary schools in England showed a significant failure in the delivery of various specialised elements of the national curriculum, especially technical education? Do the Government agree that extra help is needed to bring English primary schools up to a level of which we can all be proud?
§ Mr. PaiceThat is precisely why my right hon. Friend has announced the setting up of literacy and numeracy centres. We have had 87 bids and we are currently considering which ones to accept. I hope that they will be running by the autumn. In addition, the Teacher Training Agency is surveying current training providers to obtain much more detailed information about their provision and to ensure that we are providing primary school teachers, to whom the hon. Gentleman rightly drew attention, with the necessary skills.
§ Mr. AtkinsIs my hon. Friend aware of an organisation calling itself the Wrist Consortium? That organisation is misleading Lancashire parents into believing that the standards of the national curriculum and general standards in primary schools are not being delivered because of savage cuts in Government funding when, in fact, the Government have provided a 5.5 per cent. increase this year. It is also telling parents that standards are suffering because the county council is being forced to pass on the 5.5 per cent. to schools, which is what it should do anyway.
§ Mr. PaiceI have not heard of that organisation, but the story that my right hon. Friend describes is familiar to all of us who have heard from him and other colleagues from Lancashire about the abysmal goings-on in Lancashire county council and its education authority. I know that my right hon. Friend will do everything in his power to ensure that the people of Lancashire know how much more money the council has available to spend on education this year and that that money will go to schools and be spent in the classrooms, where it matters.