My object tonight is to ask for priority in the major school building programme approved by my right hon. Friend's Ministry for one major project in the Borough of Ilford, which I represent, and which will next year be part of the London borough of Redbridge. My right hon. Friend will be already aware that the failure of Ilford to secure one single project in the school building programme up to the end of 1967–68—which means that it has not secured a place for four years running—has been a grievous shock to the council, as well as to the school governors, the teaching staff and the parents concerned.

I have considered personally the representations made to me with the greatest care. I have discussed this matter with the chairmen of the Essex County Council and the Ilford Borough Council education committees, and I have direct personal knowledge of all the buildings and all the neighbourhoods concerned. I recently made a visit with the borough education officer to two of the schools I shall mention, and I have discussed the whole problem with the chairman of the governors. I have come to the conclusion that I owe it to the borough to bring forcibly to the notice of my right hon. Friend a state of affairs which I am sure will cause him concern.

The urgent project that I want to commend to him is the new school on a new site for the Ilford County High School for Girls. This directly affects, as I shall explain, the following three secondary modern schools—the Gearies' Girls' School, in my Division, which is now grossly overcrowded with 433 pupils, the Dane Girls' School, which is equally overcrowded with 301 pupils, the Dane Boys' School, overcrowded with 333 pupils, and, finally, the Girls' County High School itself, with 501 pupils. That makes a total of 1,597 pupils affected by this one scheme.

Inclusion of this one project in the building programme would have the following beneficial effects. It would solve all the deficiency problems at the Ilford County High School for Girls—a grammar school. It would enable the Dane Girls' and the Gearies' Girls Schools to be amalgamated into one school in the building now occupied by The Girls' County High School, which is far superior to the ones in which they are now separately housed. By taking the girls out of the existing Dane building, it would enable the Dane boys to spread themselves into the whole Dane building and thus give an interim period for readjustment before they, too, would be housed in another new building.

I have mentioned in passing the gross overcrowding in the Dane school building. I have seen it myself, and I should like to convey to my right hon. Friend something of the reality of it. Although I am concentrating on this one project and illustrating the urgent necessity for it by reference to this one pair of schools in this one building. I hope that my right hon. Friend will be aware that there are other schools in the older parts of llford that are in a very similar plight, notably, the Downshall Secondary Modern Boys' and Girls' School and Gearies' Boys' Secondary Modern School.

I wish that my right hon. Friend would convey to the noble Lord an invitation to come down to see the two Dane schools in this one building. He would find it a moving experience, and I do not know whether he would be more inspired or more horrified. Let me preface my observations by this one quotation about the girls' school. This school offers notable examples of the triumphing of spirit over matter, of vision over material difficulties. The building and site seriously cramp the school, and it is doubtful whether they can ever be made adequate to serve the purposes of secondary education.The girls' school occupies the first and second floors of the building; the boys' school uses the ground floor. Agreeable decorations, beautiful arrangements of flowers and of children's paintings and the display of fine pictures give grace and dignity to the hall and the Headmistress' room, but cannot disguise the fact that almost every side of the work suffers from the inadequacy of the building. This description of the school was written by H.M. Inspectors as long ago as 1957. One has it there from a source of impeccable reliability. And to my mind it is the triumph of spirit over the squalor of the building that is so poignant. The building is an old solid school board building built before 1904. it shares with a primary school an island site the total area of which is under 2 acres. On this island site there are 296 secondary modern girls, 314 secondary modern boys, 330 juniors and 223 infants, a total of 1,163 children. The secondary school itself, with a total of 610 pupils, is on a piecse of land 0·72 acres in extent.

Consider the girls' school, for example. The main entrance to the school would be considered bleak and furtive for the back door of a Victorian workhouse. The walls inside are harsh brick and the floors of merciless concrete. The whole atmosphere is dank and dismal, no matter how ingeniously it may be painted up. But it is not so much the aesthetic as the practical inadequacies of his building and its surroundings which should concern us. Leaving aside the brutish awkwardness of the so-called playgrounds, which are no more than a few square yards of puddled tarmac, every single respect in which modern education has progressed creates insuperable problems in such an old and cramped building. It is adapted to the days of "reading and writing and' rithmetic taught to the tune of a hickory stick".

The one hall space has to serve for physical education as well as assembly, and all the gear has to be stowed somewhere somehow in passages and cubbyholes all over the school. Clothing is stowed in wire cages in passageways. The headmistress's study is partitioned off from this one common place, and the anteroom to it is occupied by the school secretary. Since this anteroom has also to be used as a sick bay, it is occupied by the three or four girls who may happen at any one time to be unwell at school and who are lying about under blankets on chairs arranged to make up some sort of bed.

When the girls change lessons, each class has to troop through other classrooms. Lessons have to be arranged so that nothing is done which requires concentration when one of the three other schools that share the site is using the playground. Music, which is a great feature of the life of the school, cannot be played out of earshot of the classrooms. The tiny rooms which serve for teaching the arts of home-making, cooking and sewing have also to be used for school meals, so that the paraphernalia has to be cleared away and reassembled before and after each meal. The teaching of mathematics, which has made such huge strides recently, is cripplingly handicapped in the poky classrooms, with miniature desks and no space for drawing boards or proper-sized paper, let alone the kind of models which modern concepts of the teaching of mathematics require The science laboratories, and the technical workshops in the boys' school, are utterly inadequate. There is no space for a library separate from the holding of classes.

I am sure that my right hon. Friend knows very well what I mean. He has seen more schools than most people, and he has seen the best, too. He knows the standards which modern school buildings achieve

If the conditions for the girls are unsatisfactory, the conditions for the staff of 29 women teachers are indescribable. The staff room would be more what one would expect to find in the fo'c's'le of a windjammer in the 1860s than in a common room for professional people in the 1960s. This is very serious, because the staff who have made the school and known it and loved it for decades are the stayers, but new staff will not put up with this state of affairs. It seems terribly unfair that these people, who put up with so much and who have always had to make do and mend, should see no light at the end of the tunnel, when other teachers in Ilford and Outer Essex have such marvellous conditions in the splendid new schools which have been built.

I make no apology if what I have said sounds rather like a long whine and "bellyache". It is. It comes properly from me, and I do not think that it could, in all honesty, be otherwise. But I want to make clear that this complaining is totally unrepresentative of the patience, courage, resourcefulness and creative joy which makes this depressing place radiant with delight, happiness and constructive effort. In fact, it really is more than anything else because I could not bear to see these marvellous people getting the muddy end of the stick, when they are being so fine and brave, that I am raising this matter tonight. Also, it is becoming painfully invidious that there should be such disparity between the conditions of children who go to older schools like this one, and like Gearies or Downshall, and those who, through the mere accident of geography, go to one of the many beautiful new schools in other parts of the borough.

I have tried to tell my right hon. Friend tonight some of the things that are in the hearts of the people whom he and I try to serve, but I do not want him to think that the Ilford Education Committee, or, for example, the governors of Dane School, or, least of all, the staff of this and other older schools in the borough, are truculent, intemperate or stupid, or unaware of his difficulties and those of the noble Lord—or, indeed, the difficulties of the Chancellor of the exchequer. They know as well as anyone of the special problems of Essex because of the vast expansion of the population in that county and of the school population especially. They know as well as anyone the special priority which has been given to Essex in approvals of school building programmes

Also, they know perfectly well the facts of economic life. They realise well that every brick and every man hour which is used to build new schools is a brick and a man hour that cannot be used for building new hospitals, roads and houses. They realise that "Gouverner, c'est choisir", that one cannot have everything and there has to be a choice of what one has and where and when one has it. The people on whose behalf I am speaking are not party to any captious or carping criticism, and they are certainly not anxious to make party political capital out of the inevitable limitation of our resources, of which they are well aware. They are not unreasonable people. But they do feel that their genuine needs are being overlooked in the perspective of the undoubted needs of other parts of the county.

It is because I sympathise with them, and it is on their behalf, that I ask my right hon. Friend urgently to impress upon the noble Lord the needs of the borough of Ilford in future school-building programmes, especially in regard to the older schools in the borough which, although they can be made to serve a purpose, are really not up to the standards which we are now achieving in secondary education in other parts of the borough and of the county.