§ 11 am
§ Mr. Boris Johnson (Henley)I am pleased to have secured this debate. I do not pretend that it is of such burning importance in terms of human suffering as the very good debate that we have just had on Zimbabwe, but it is an important subject none the less. I am grateful to the Minister for School Standards for his presence. I realise that the issue is not his direct responsibility. I understand that the Minister responsible for adult education is engaged elsewhere, but I am sure that the Minister for School Standards will be a more than adequate replacement. I am a keen admirer of his intellectual attainments.
I hope that if the Minister follows my argument he will go some way down the road to understanding a couple of general criticisms that people like me make of the Government. In particular, we are concerned about the astonishing rate at which council tax is rising this spring and the general problems caused by the over-prescriptive approach that the Government sometimes take to education. I do not want to harangue the Minister, who has been obliging in coming here today. I simply urge him to listen with good will to what I have to say about the suffering and the painful bureaucratic overload on those who are engaged in providing adult education, and to consider whether he can think of some concrete answers and offer some hope for people in south Oxfordshire.
I am sure that, even if he is not responsible for adult education, the Minister will be familiar with the keep-fit-for-fun W161 course that was run by Oxfordshire county council and used to take place in Wallingford in the neighbouring constituency to mine. Many people used to enjoy that course: 50 women used to do keep fit for fun under the auspices of a very gifted physical education teacher called Andrea. Among other things they would do the grapevine, which, as I am sure the Minister will know, is a complicated physical exercise involving putting one's feet sideways and then together, then sideways and then together again, and then standing on one's toes. It is exhausting and good for these women who wrote to tell me how much they enjoyed it. The 50 women ranged in ages from about 40 to over 80.
To my dismay, I discovered that the teacher of keep fit for fun, Andrea, had decided that she could no longer continue with the class. The game was not worth the candle. Even the attractions of the grapevine palled because she was inundated with Government-inspired paperwork. That is the core of my submission to the Minister. Andrea was asked every year to fill in no fewer than 300 forms about her 50 pupils. The Minister is a skilled mathematician and so he would be able to work out that she was legally obliged to fill in six forms per pupil per year. She had to measure the women's attainments in co-ordination, stamina and general fitness in order to provide the county council with evidence of their success. She decided that she did not come into PE teaching for that. She told me that she was giving it up because of "all the new paperwork." She said that she was not paid for it, and she did not see why she should do it. To use a colloquialism, she jacked it in; she could not be bothered to do it any more, and instead went private. She decided to go outside the ambit of 214WH adult education; she potentially removed that course from some of my constituents by taking her course out of the sphere of normal adult education. That is sad, as I am sure the Minister will agree.
I shall quote the husband of one the students of Andrea, the keep-fit instructress, who wrote to me about the closure of the course in moving words. He said:
Does it matter that 50 women in Oxfordshire may have had taken from them the opportunity to lift their health and spirits once a week by the need of some Council bureaucrat to worship at the management shrine of 'accountability'? Well, it does to the women involved. The Council is paid to help them, not hinder them … But I think it also illustrates a cancer that is infiltrating today's society: the compulsion of many politicians to control, measure and manage everything, whatever the cost, and for bureaucrats to impose their faddish business models and processes on everything that moves. Trapped in their hermetic world of administration it never seems to occur to them to ask 'Isn't this a bit daft?' when issuing a new edict. Whatever happened to common sense?Those are the words of a husband of one of the keep-fit-for-fun enthusiasts. One can understand the real irritation, embarrassment and annoyance of husbands who hoped that their wives would enjoy doing keep-fit-for-fun classes only to find that that pleasurable activity was being taken from them.I was surprised enough to discover the travails of keep-fit Andrea, but I then received a letter from another constituent, a Mr. Edward Horsup of Woodcote, who is a bridge teacher in adult education. I hope, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that you and the Minister will not mind my reading what he said about the burdens being inflicted on him. He wrote:
In common with other Adult Ed teachers, I have to make regular checks to see that I'm on the right tracks; and to report on each student individually. This will prove a time-consuming business, as everything will have to be processed. As one from the Don't Let the Bastards Grind You Down school I shall soldier on, hoping for better things … Other teachers, maybe less resolute, or perhaps without the time available inside or outside their course, will leave the profession. People who attend classes—students, although some are very elderly—are unlikely to enthuse about constantly filling in forms. They may think their time is being badly wasted, and drop out. Managers who run Adult Ed courses are having to cope with constant protests, and have to organise all this extra bureaucracy to boot. I know of at least two managers who will soon leave their jobs because of extra pressures.Mr. Horsup went on to point out something to which many people in the health service will attest, which is the great benefit of adult education to society—and not only of keep fit for fun, bridge and so on. It keeps people active, and keeps their minds and bodies alert. It is of general benefit to society. Without a major interest such as playing bridge, people just sit back in boredom, thinking of excuses to visit the doctor. Mr. Horsup continued:Some people have been coming to my classes for years and years. Yet this quango aims to have no one attending a class for more than three years; they should then do something else.And so he goes on. It would be good if the Minister could think of some way of addressing those concerns.I received a letter from yet another husband, this time of a lady who has for a long time run a watercolour class in Watlington. I hope that the Minister will forgive me if I labour the point, but he will be startled by the identical way in which these people complain. They are serious, sensible and sober people, and I am sure that he will accept that they have a point. The letter says: 215WH
This tide of regulation which started with tutor-training sessions to risk assessments to lesson plans and monitoring of students and even continues with questioning students is driven by an army of coordinators, administrators and inspectors all backed up with the threat of financial penalty.There is no subsidy. The letter continues:The end seems to be more administration and less classes, typical results for government interference.Those are the words of a husband whose wife has been giving watercolour classes for many years in south Oxfordshire.I am sure that the Minister will make the case that public subsidy for adult education classes should be accompanied by some sort of regulation. There should be a broad oversight of what goes on, and I believe that that would be common ground for us all. However, I wonder whether such regulation needs to go quite as far as sending someone who gives classes in watercolours or keep fit a form of stupendous length, which covers the induction checklist, scheme of work, individual learning plan, lesson plan, progress report, initial evaluation form, end-of-course evaluation form, course report, additional learning support form, learner handbook, samples of student work, course description and student destination. That is too much to ask people in adult education to complete. A sledgehammer is being taken to crack a nut. I wonder whether, in the time that we have available to us today and in a collegial spirit of cooperation, we can think of a way of alleviating the problem.
I believe that there should be some element of a market solution to the problem. If a course is had or deficient, if people are bored by it, or if it is plainly not satisfactory, and would not, in the view of the Government or the Learning and Skills Council, rightly command public subsidy, it seems probable that people would drift away from it. The Minister might think creatively about ways of exploiting that natural phenomenon.
Could the Minister—I appreciate that it is not his subject—clarify whether the intention behind all the bureaucracy and regulation is to extinguish some of the courses, on the ground that the Department of Education and Skills and the Learning and Skills Council do not in their hearts believe that they are fit subjects for "education", and therefore are not deserving of public subsidy?
Is the intention to regulate the courses out of existence by inundating their teachers and tutors with such a quantity of paperwork? If that is the intention, it is the wrong way of approaching it. It would be more honest if the Department were to say that watercolours, keep fit, bridge and the many thousands of other classes that people enjoy, and that bring people together throughout the country, do not deserve public subsidy and that it will chop that subsidy. It would be better to be honest and upfront about it than to bully people out of doing a job that they enjoy and to drive people away from adult education courses. I am not sure that that is the intention, and I see that the Minister shakes his head, but he should realise that that is what is happening, and that that is the effect of the regulations that have been produced.
216WH I hope that the Minister will recognise that I have made a case for the existence of a genuine problem, which it is not beyond his considerable powers of imagination to address. I am sure that his fertile intellect will come up with a solution over the next 16 minutes.
I do not recommend the solution that the Department famously came up with before, which was to send teachers already inundated with paperwork a wonderful 150-page document called something like "How to deal with paperwork, and how to solve your problems with bureaucracy, part 1—part 2 follows shortly." I do not think that that will be the solution, and I am sure that the Minister will not want to go down that route.
As I promised at the outset, I want to draw attention to two of the wider ramifications of the phenomenon that I have—I hope hon. Members will agree—convincingly described. I spoke earlier of the forms that Andrea had to fill in when assessing the progress of women who are often aged 80 or over in achieving fitness. She said that the forms were rather depressing. The Minister is beaming, but it is sometimes difficult to put a positive gloss on attempts to improve the fitness of women aged 80 or over, or to say that their general stamina and co-ordination are improving, even with the ministrations of Andrea in Wallingford. She said that she found it taxing and dispiriting to fill in forms intended to record the progress of her charges, when some of them had, quite frankly, made no progress. In a word, the process was completely and utterly pointless, and it was driving her bonkers.
Of course, that is not the end of it. Andrea screwed her courage to the sticking place and made an effort to fill in all the forms. However, there will be a consequence if she or her successor keeps on meeting prescriptions imposed by the Learning and Skills Council or the Government. The Minister knows exactly what I am about to say: someone at the LSC or at Oxfordshire county council will have to process those nonsensical forms, full of meaningless statistics about the non-improvement in the fitness of 80-year-olds who do the grapevine. Someone will have to tabulate those forms, and that person will be a council official of one sort or another. They will have their salary and pension requirements, and there will be increased national insurance payments. That is why we are seeing such huge rises in our council taxes this spring.
The regulation that I have described therefore generates higher taxation, and I urge the Minister carefully to reconsider what can be done to alleviate the problem. As I am sure he knows, Oxfordshire's council tax will rise by 14 or 15 per cent. this year, and £2.7 million will be needed to meet the increase in national insurance contributions. Council tax payers are therefore paying for the increased contributions of council officials. That is a perfect example of excessive paperwork requiring an ontological expansion in the number of council officials, and placing needless extra burdens on council tax payers. I hope that the Minister agrees that I have made a case for linking regulation with taxation. Those are the fiscal consequences of this sort of madness.
217WH I shall make a general point about—I say this tentatively—deficiencies in the Government's general attitude to education. The total assets of Yale and Harvard—the Minister probably went to one of them, or to the John F. Kennedy School of Government, although he is shaking his head—are about £12 billion. The total assets of the top 16 British universities in the Russell group, however, are far less than £1 billion in toto. One must therefore wonder whether the Government's highly prescriptive regulatory approach to education is delivering the results that we want.
I do not want to draw in too many tangential subjects, but perhaps I can tempt the Minister to say whether he agrees with his colleague, the Minister for Lifelong Learning and Higher Education, that there should be quotas for access to Oxbridge from the maintained sector and whether he agrees with the principle of an access regulator, about which the Government now seem to be in doubt. I draw in those tangential subjects because they are directly relevant to the Government's vice of over-prescription in higher education. We shall not make universities better by regulating them in the way that the Government favour, or improve them by bullying them as the Government continue to do. Nor shall we improve adult education if we continue to bully people like keep-fit Andrea and, effectively, drive them out of the profession.
I am sure that the Minister will forgive me for having gone on for so long; I expect that he, too, has many views on the matter, which he will want to expand at length. If, together, we can come up with a positive way to alleviate the excessive burdens on people delivering adult education in Oxfordshire, many who doubt the good sense of the Government will begin to think that their heart is in the right place.
§ The Minister for School Standards (Mr. David Miliband)First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) on his tour de force, and on his continuing concern for the well-being of his constituents, particularly those with an adult education interest. Keen students of the hon. Gentleman will know that he has devoted some attention to the subject in his outpourings in different parts of the national press. Andrea was Amelia in November, when we first caught sight of the horror that is unfolding in Oxfordshire. She was still teaching the grapevine as part of a Nietzschean struggle to lose weight. I am sorry that we did not get a chance to debate Nietzsche today. I also apologise for the absence of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), my ministerial colleague, who has a personal engagement that he cannot break.
I shall address the hon. Gentleman's points, starting from his comment that adult education is good for individuals and for the community, and that it is for individuals to choose what sort of adult education they want. It is their choice whether they learn the grapevine or Greek, and it is the Government's responsibility to support that; it is part of being a healthy community. The hon. Gentleman will be pleased to know that funding for adult education is increasing significantly—I shall go through the figures for Oxfordshire in a moment. By any measure, the Government's commitment to adult education in many forms is clear. I hope that we shall not fall out about that.
218WH Secondly, the hon. Gentleman's remarks concerned the between accountability—the need for balance proper spending of public money—and a light-touch system that does not bog down either students or teachers in mindless bureaucracy, least of all bureaucracy that feeds off itself and creates a vicious spiral of officialdom that has to scrutinise it. He was good enough to recognise the need for an accountability mechanism. The first port of call in any adult education institution is the principal; it is his or her job to ensure that the teachers are of a good standard. Most people recognise that the Government's proposals will lead adult education institutions to have a clearer focus on their courses, and their principals to have a clearer set of responsibilities to ensure high standards.
I am not familiar with the area, but I understand that the adult learning inspectorate is designed to maintain quality. The experience of Ofsted in the school sector is that there has been a positive effect over the past 10 years. Ofsted has brought qualitative judgments to bear on the performance of individual schools, helping to raise their quality. We hope that something similar will occur in relation to adult education.
The situation in Oxfordshire bears some scrutiny. My statistics suggest that in Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, the single learning and skills council for those three areas has a budget of about £155 million—a significant sum of public money—about two thirds of which is spent on young people under 18. None the less, about £44 million, a substantial amount of provision, is spent on adult education. I understand that the money is spent on work-based learning contracts, including 17 further education contracts, nine of which are with FE colleges and others of which are with adult community groups and higher education establishments. The dividing lines between those sectors are less stark than they used to be, which is a good thing. In addition, money goes to 36 sixth forms and 16 projects for young people.
Of course, Oxfordshire local education authority also funds courses. I understand that it receives about £1.94 million for adult and community learning, supporting 19,000 learners in Oxfordshire. I am unsure whether any of those courses are in the three classes described by the hon. Gentleman, but the adult education commitment of the LEA is delivered through 28 community education centres. All our information suggests that work of high quality is being carried out and that courses of some distinction are being run.
I was shocked by the tale of woe set out by the hon. Gentleman. It is in no one's interests if teachers and tutors are being driven out of the system, let alone being driven mad. It is in no one's interests if choice is thereby being reduced and provision is of a lower quality. I take seriously his allegation that, motivated by the best of interests—namely, higher quality—the Government are achieving the worst of ends. Although I can imagine some possible solutions, it would not be appropriate for me to ski so far off-piste as to mention them.
§ Mr. JohnsonGiven that the Minister has been so kind as to agree with my central point and has offered us the tantalising prospect of skiing off-piste, and given that we are in the less formal confines of Westminster Hall and that the issue is not really party political, I 219WH should be grateful if he could adumbrate the ideas that are floating through his capacious mind about how the problem could be solved.
§ Mr. MilibandI am glad to have the opportunity to continue my train of thought. The Learning and Skills Council is a new organisation, which brings together the funds for adult education in a way that has not been done before, and should reduce, rather than increase, bureaucracy. I want to make a few points about process before I come to the points of substance.
I shall get in touch with my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South as well as with the LSC, to bring to their attention the specific issues raised and to ask them for an explanation. We should try to ascertain whether the problem lies with the local education authority or with the LSC, and determine whether every learning and skills council is adopting a similar policy or whether the Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire LSC is adopting a particularly rigorous regime. We need to get to the bottom of this and to ascertain whether there are national edicts. I would be interested in seeing the results of such an inquiry.
One danger in government is of its different parts, even in the same Department, collecting the same information. The hon. Gentleman referred a couple of times to pieces of information that were required. Some of that information is very basic, such as names, numbers or sizes of classes. We are trying to cut out that sort of duplication in relation to schools. I hope that we can investigate whether such duplication is occurring in adult education. It drives people mad to have to give the same piece of information twice, three times or more.
I should also like to find out whether the LEA and LSC are working in complete harmony, because the LSC needs to operate in a way that dovetails with the work of the LEA. We should try to investigate that third area to see whether it is a cause of unnecessary bureaucracy. I hope that I have convinced the hon. Gentleman that I take his points seriously. I am grateful to have had a brief opportunity to hear him make his points personally, rather than having to read them.
11.30 am
Sitting suspended until Two o'clock.