Orders of the Day — Education

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 3 November 1978.

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Photo of Dr Rhodes Boyson Dr Rhodes Boyson , Brent North 12:00, 3 November 1978

I am very glad to come to the help of the Secretary of State. Whenever she desires my help in any way, it will always be given very willingly. I said at the beginning of my remarks that there was no 100 per cent. choice. However, taking the right hon. Lady's figure of 800, if it is known in an area that there is real choice and if a school finds that no one wants to go to it, the odds are that that school itself will do something about it and make itself more popular. Generally, it has nothing to do with buildings. When I was a head teacher in Islington, there were schools, built at the same time, one of which would have three applications for every place whereas the other would not have one application for every three places. I believe that if schools knew that their future continuance at a time of a falling birth rate depended on parents being confident about sending their children to them, there would be no cases in the second year of 800 children wanting to go to school A as against school B. School B would make it its business to discover why parents wanted their children to go to school A. If that improved school B, it would be to the advantage of the system throughout.

However, the emphasis of this is not that of 800 children wanting to go to a school with 300 places. Today, we are being promised "planned operating capacity". What a terrible phrase that is. One can almost feel the clothes of the corporate State upon one. It sounds like a war-time expression.

The hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Price) gave the game away about "planned operating capacity". His concern that the Opposition did not bring the facts to light seemed to indicate the degree of unpopularity which planned operating capacity would have in the eyes of the general public. If this is introduced and there is to be merely an appeals system locally and nationally, everyone will want to know what teeth there are in the appeals system before agreeing to it. The Opposition do not want planned operating capacity. We do not like the words. We do not like what they mean. We prefer parental choice.

Planned operating capacity will mean local education authorities ignoring the wishes of parents who do not want their children to go to school B instead of to school A. The local authorities will insist on those children going to school B and will insist on that school staying open when there are vacancies in school A.

In the borough of Brent, and certainly in my own constituency, there is already a shortage of Catholic and Jewish places. This year, the form which has been sent out, despite the 1963 London Government Act, did not specify the schools outside the borough to which children could be sent. As the birth rate has fallen, more and more children have been going into schools in the Wembley area where the schools are academically and socially extremely good. But now we find that parents in Willesden and Harlesden also want their children to go to those schools. Why should they not go to those schools? Can they go to those schools only if they live in the catchment area because their parents can afford to pay £50,000 for their homes or can influence the local housing authority to house them there?

This planned operating capacity will mean saying to parents who already live in downtown areas—Neasden exists not only in Private Eye but in reality— "No. Your children cannot go to Kingsbury High, which had some 42 university places last year and some seven Oxbridge places. They must go to these other schools and perhap in 20 years they will be good schools. It is hard luck that your children are of this age at present." That is what it will mean. It will not mean the deprivation of articulate middle class parents. It will mean the deprivation of children who live in downtown areas. That is why I feel particularly strongly about this issue.

I know that there will never be, as I have said, the 100 per cent. parental choice, but it is a question of the emphasis that one gives to this matter. Freedom in a society does not arrive in a day, and it does not go away in a day. It is a slow build-up or a slow retraction, as time goes on. Any lessening of parental choice in this way will mean a lessening of freedom in this country and one more nail in the continuance of a free society in Britain. I do not say that there will be an outcry when this is brought to light, but there will be considerable concern. I was surprised by the speech of the hon. Member for Lewisham, West —I say this pleasantly—in which he was backing up this argument, remembering the article that he wrote on 7th September 1971, a copy of which I have in my hand, in which he even backed the educational voucher.

People are very keen to quote my writings in the Black Papers. I am delighted that they do so. I welcome their reading them. But at that time the hon. Member said that in this country the voucher was being supported by the Right and that in America it was being done by the Left. It seems to me that with the sense of anarchic freedom that goes with the hon. Member, which I appreciate and admire, he should be with us on this issue, if on nothing else.