Orders of the Day — Education Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 22 June 1959.

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Photo of Mr Geoffrey Lloyd Mr Geoffrey Lloyd , Sutton Coldfield 12:00, 22 June 1959

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I commend this Bill to the House. Its purpose is to give voluntary schools the help necessary to enable them to play their part in the Government's plans for school building, especially for the provision of a wide range of facilities for secondary education, as set out in the recent White Paper, "Secondary Education for All". The Bill is, in fact, designed to prevent the development of a situation in which, through lack of funds, children in aided or special agreement schools have less good opportunities than those in county and controlled schools.

The Government have approached the problem in the all-party spirit of 1944, and I should like to repeat my acknowledgment of the help and advice which I have had from the right hon. and hon. Gentlemen opposite and from below the Gangway. There has been a feeling on all sides, as there was in 1944, that religious questions should not become an issue of party politics. Among the Churches there is substantial support for the Bill and, though it does not meet all points of view, I hope that it will be accepted as a Measure which, in accordance with our national tradition, has been designed to reconcile as far as possible the differing views of the bodies affected by it.

From the outset it has been the Government's intention not to depart from the principles underlying the Education Act, 1944, and its predecessor of 1936. Rather, we have tried to apply them to the changed circumstances of today. Broadly speaking, it was the aim of the Act of 1944 to help existing denominational schools to play their part in the reforms embodied in the Act. It was accepted that with higher standards and increased costs the voluntary bodies could no longer find by themselves the sums required to bring their school buildings up to standard, to replace them where necessary and to keep them in repair. The Minister of Education was, therefore, required to make a grant of half the cost of alterations and repairs to existing schools, and he was also empowered to make similar grants towards the cost of rebuilding schools on new sites or providing new schools to replace existing schools, in whole or in part. In addition, the Education Act of 1944 re-enacted the provisions of the Act of 1936. This gave local education authorities the power to make grants to the denominations of between 50 and 75 per cent, towards the cost of providing secondary schools for children who had attended denominational schools to the age of 11.

This had two implications. First, the Churches were not expected to bear unaided the cost of raising the school-leaving age, which was one of the main provisions of the Act of 1936. Secondly, the number of new secondary school places which they could be helped to provide under the 1936 Act was limited to what was needed to match the primary school places existing at that time. In other words, the Act of 1936 photographed, as it were, the existing provision for juniors, and the Churches were to be helped to make corresponding provision for seniors.

By 1944, however, it became obvious that the existing distribution of Church schools did not everywhere fit in with local needs and wishes. Accordingly, those schools which were unable or unwilling to find half the cost of alteration, replacement and external repairs were given the option of handing over their liabilities to the local education authority and becoming "controlled". Over 4,700 schools have chosen this alternative, and the number of "aided" schools—schools which are fully denominational—is only about half what it was in 1944.

I should like to dwell for a moment on the magnitude of this change. It means that now only about one-seventh of the children in schools maintained by local education authorities are in aided schools, whereas in 1938 the proportion was about one-third and in 1902 it was more than half. This tremendous contraction in the denominational sector of the educational system has had two consequences. The first is that the old problem of the single school area—areas where the only school within reach was denominational—has shrunk to very much smaller proportions. The second is that religious tests for teachers are now applied only in a small minority of the nation's schools.

These great changes were made possible by the sincere desire of all parties to provide better educational conditions for the children and to ensure that the benefits of the 1944 Act extended to children in all schools, voluntary and county alike. The tide of educational reform lifted the Act of 1944 over the sunken rocks of old religious controversies and carried it safely into harbour. I think that we all realise that the ship was piloted with exceptional skill. I have in mind, of course, my right hon. Friend the present Home Secretary, and the right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede), who was then Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education, and also Archbishop Temple and, on the Free Church side, Dr. Scott-Lidgett, to whose statesmanship the country owes a great debt.

Before I come to the present Bill I should like to say something about the Act of 1953, which had a significant bearing on the problems of the dual system. Section 1 of that Act went as far as it is possible to go in helping the denominations to build schools for areas of new housing while preserving a link with existing denominational school places. It enabled the Minister to pay grant towards the provision of schools on new housing estates, provided that the pupils had moved from an area where there was an aided or special agreement school which they would otherwise have attended. That provision still stands, and the rate of grant will be increased by this Bill from 50 to 75 per cent. In that way, the new housing areas, which I know present the Churches with great problems, will receive some additional help.

I come to the present Bill. Its main provisions are two. In Clause 1 (1) it raises the maximum rate of grant on the categories of voluntary school building work eligible as the law now stands from 50 to 75 per cent. In Clause 1 (2) it empowers the Minister to offer up to 75 per cent, grant to new aided secondary schools needed wholly or mainly for the continued education of children from aided primary schools of the same denomination. The primary schools in question are those existing now or, of course, schools that may subsequently replace them.

I do not think that I need say much about the first proposal, which simply raises the rate of grant on work which can attract it as the law now stands. I believe that it is recognised by everyone, including the Free Churches, that some increase is necessary. There have been developments since 1944 which could not be foreseen at the time. These include not only the very big movements of population which I have mentioned already in connection with the 1953 Act but also the increase in the number of children of school age due to the rise in the birth rate. The need to provide new places for these additional children has led to a piling up of arrears of improvements to existing schools and the postponement of the reorganisation of all-age schools into separate primary and secondary schools. These are the tasks which now confront the Churches, and in the meantime there has been a great increase in building costs.

As the result, the Churches now have to face liabilities in excess of anything envisaged in 1943. I understand that they have already paid out about £18 million, and they will have to pay a good deal more before they start on the programme for the five years 1960–65 with which the recent White Paper was concerned. Proposals for aided and special agreement schools that have been submitted for the first two years alone of that five year period total about £37 million, and, as the law now stands, about half of this large sum would probably fall on the voluntary bodies. It is impossible to make a precise calculation comparing the financial position as it looked in 1944 and as it looks now, since so many of the factors have altered during the last 15 years, but I am quite satisfied that in raising the rate of grant to 75 per cent, we shall not be giving the denominations more help than they really need.

I turn now to the second main provision of the Bill, the grants and loans provided in subsections (2) to (4) of Clause 1 for new aided secondary schools needed wholly or mainly for children from existing aided primary schools. What we are trying to do here is to apply the principles of the 1936 Act to the present situation. That Act enabled local education authorities to make grants to the denominations for special agreement schools; that is, schools built under agreements between the promoters and themselves. These were schools for children of secondary school age who up to the age of 11 had attended voluntary schools. The 1944 Act kept alive this provision of the 1936 Act, but only to the extent that specific proposals had been made before the war, and, of course, the pre-war proposals cannot all fit the circumstances of today, especially where there have been big movements of population in the postwar years. Nor can they be made to cover the wide range of secondary schools which are now needed in place of the "senior elementary" schools which were originally envisaged in the agreements.

Subsections (2) to (4) of Clause 1 will help the denominations to build secondary schools, including grammar and technical schools, always provided that the secondary schools are needed to match existing aided primary schools, or, of course, schools built to replace existing primary schools. It substitutes an up-to-date photograph of the primary school position for the pre-war photograph, but it still preserves the principle of a limit. It is this Section of the Bill which has caused the Free Churches particular anxiety, and I am sure that the House would wish me to say that these anxieties deserve the most careful and sympathetic consideration. As the right hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. C. Davies) told the House earlier this month, the Free Churches have made big sacrifices in the interests of educational advance, and I hold myself under a very heavy special responsibility to do all I reasonably can to meet their point of view.

It was for this reason that I invited representatives of the Free Churches to meet me last week, soon after the Bill had been published, to give them any further explanations they might want and to consider how any difficulties they might foresee, particularly over the single-school areas, could, in practice, be resolved. I suggested that the best way of dealing with single school areas would be for the Free Churches to examine the problem jointly with the Church of England and I offered my good offices in arranging an early meeting. I am glad to be able to tell the House that this offer has been accepted, and that a meeting is to take place later this week.

I also suggested that if there were a central Committee of the Free Church Federal Council, like the Church of England Schools Council, I should be very willing to make myself accessible to it, to examine with it questions of joint concern and, more generally, to establish regular means of dealing with any difficulties that might arise. I am glad to say that the Free Church representatives thought this a useful suggestion and promised to give it careful consideration. For my part, I very much hope that it will be possible to establish such a body at an early date, and on a firm and authoritative basis, since many of the difficulties which the Free Churches foresee can best be resolved, if they arise, by administrative means. But while the Bill does not touch directly on the problems of existing single school areas, I should like to assure the House that it is certainly not my expectation that subsections (2) to (4) of Clause 1 will lead to the creation of new areas of this kind. I should like to repeat the assurance I gave in my statement to the House on 11th June that in dealing with any proposal under Section 13 of the 1944 Act for a new denominational secondary school I would consider very carefully the use that is made of the new grants.

I shall also make full use of my powers under Section 13 to ensure that proposals for new schools are consistent with an efficient and economical organisation of schools in the area concerned. This duty is already laid on me by Section 76 of the same Act, which requires me to have regard to the general principle that pupils are to be educated in accordance with the wishes of their parents so far as is compatible with the provision of efficient instruction and training and the avoidance of unreasonable public expenditure. The only other section of the Bill to which I need call attention is Clause 1 (7), which deals with the date of application. The help given by the Bill is intended to enable the Churches to tackle the programme set out in the Government's White Paper "Secondary Education for All". This programme starts in 1960, and the Bill therefore applies to proposals in the 1960–61 and later building programmes, but not to proposals in programmes for earlier years. The building programmes, however, cover only major works; that is, projects costing £20,000 or more. Minor works, that is, projects costing less than £20,000, are, apart from very small jobs, approved individually by my Department. These minor works will benefit if approval was not given before the date of the introduction of the Bill. Where no approval is required, the criterion will be whether work started before the date of the Bill's introduction. The object of these arrangements is to avoid retrospection, to avoid causing delay in the flow of building proposals, and to make it easy to determine by reference to a decision already given whether a particular project will benefit or not.

Finally, I should like to say a word about cost. The increase in capital grants is likely to cost the Exchequer about £38 million, which may be spread over fifteen to twenty years according to the rate of school building, The increase in the amount of grant on repairs is not likely to cost more than £100,000 a year. It is not possible to say how much the enlarged power to make loans will cost the Exchequer, but there will be some saving in loan expenditure as a result of the increased grants provided for by subsection (1) of Clause 1.

The total cost to the Exchequer is, therefore, likely to be about £40 million over the next fifteen to twenty years. The benefit to the Churches will, however, be about £10 million less than this, since the new arrangements are likely to transfer most of the responsibility for outstanding special agreement proposals from the local education authorities to the Exchequer. When these schools are built, the Churches will receive the same amount of grant as they do now, but the money will come entirely from the Exchequer instead of jointly from the local authority and central funds.

I hope that I have said enough to make it clear that this is a limited Measure—