Orders of the Day — Self-Governing Schools etc. (Scotland) Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 5:27 pm on 6 March 1989.

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Photo of Donald Dewar Donald Dewar , Glasgow Garscadden 5:27, 6 March 1989

The Secretary of State plays with consummate skill, which comes from long practice, the role of a reasonable man struggling with an unreasonable brief. His problems have never been deeper than they are today. He complains bitterly that the Labour party's document deals at some length with the case for opting out. He may have read the 21 pages of text but he clearly did not read the title, which is Opting out—the Government's case examined. Not surprisingly, he spent some time establishing to my satisfaction, as well as to the satisfaction of my hon. Friends, that there is no case for the Government's proposals. If the Secretary of State is a little worried about the fact that the Labour party is showing signs of developing self knowledge and a critical faculty, I suggest to him that that kind of humility is something that he should consider importing into Conservative thinking. It would do a great deal of good.

This is a dishonest Bill. Even its title is dishonest. All the talk about self-governing schools is spurious window-dressing. I am sorry that even the draftsmen are being dragged into the Government's propaganda war. The Bill adds to the confusion, because this is an inexact new category. On this occasion I should have preferred the Government to take a leaf out of the Department of Education and Science's book and talk about grant-maintained schools. That term would at least have had the virtue of being understandable, and I shall continue to use it.

The core of the Bill is opting out. The first contention is that no one in Scotland, wants it—not even the parents in whose name it has been introduced. I notice that the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland the hon. Member for Stirling (Mr. Forsyth), whose words I always follow with interest, told a rather sceptical Scottish Question Time on 1 March that the Hungarians expressed considerable admiration for the emphasis that we place on increasing competition in our education system".—[Official Report, 1 March 1989; Vol. 148, c. 270.] I am prepared to believe that one has to travel as far as Hungary to find support for the Bill, but I find it difficult to believe that a man is sitting on a Budapest bus, lost in envy and admiration for the activities of the hon. Member for Stirling. There must be some mistake.

Local government is almost united in its opposition. The teaching profession will have none of the new proposals. I know that there is a tendency for the Minister to treat one with contempt and express some hatred for the other but those are significant opinions and should not be swept aside, particularly when very strong reservations have been expressed by bodies in Scotland on whom the Minister has relied for his rather thin support in the past. For example, I have a press release from the Scottish Parent Teacher Council. There are disputes about how representative that body is, but it has been prayed in aid by the Minister in the past. It states: the successful establishment of School Boards will be jeopardised by the undue haste with which the Government is pursuing these proposals. The council goes on to say that it believes that comprehensive education might well be compromised by those proposals and that it would be more honest to have an open and informed debate about its successes and failures rather than allowing it to be incidentally eroded as a consequence of this proposed legislation. The Scottish Consumer Council, which on some occasions has taken the Minister's side, refers to the Bill as "ill-timed" and states that its proposals do not offer parents a significant extension of choice". The kindest thing that I can say is that the Bill has very little support. It is significant and regrettable that almost all the research that the Minister has mounted in conjunction with the proposals has examined parental and public attitudes to the present system. He has made no attempt whatsoever to canvass the views of the wider Scottish public—parents, teachers or anyone else—about the proposed measures. According to the MVA consultancy study, £121,715 of public money has been spent, I suspect as a trawl in the hope that it will produce critical material that the Minister can use in a totally negative way to attack the present position. It is the brunt of the bunker mentality which has marked Scottish Office debate for a considerable time.

The signs have been bad from the beginning. There was the bizarre episode of Paisley grammar school with the Prime Minister telling the Scottish Office its business, and no nonsense from the Secretary of State for Scotland. We received a fairly detailed account of that from a number of sources, including the roving journalist who acted as go-between. There were also the activities of the Minister, before electoral chance promoted him to office. I remind the House that if one looks back to the proceedings of the House on 21 October 1986 considering the Education Bill (Lords) which applied only to England and Wales, a young, keen Turk of the Right, the hon. Member for Stirling with the experience of a number of years at Westminster city council, proposed opting-out clauses almost exactly parallel to what he is now trying to foist on to the people of Scotland. He argued specifically that they would bring tremendous support and morale among the teaching profession"—[Official Report, 21 October 1986; Vol. 102, c. 1040.] and were what parents wanted. If those were the grounds on which the Minister introduced such a measure in England, the same test should be applied to his proposals for Scotland, but if they were, they would bite the dust immediately. The arrogance with which the measure is being pursued is alarming. It has been put forward as a matter of faith and dogma, and is not based on the existing Scottish education system or the wishes of people involved in the education system.

An interesting article appeared in the Financial Times on 23 February under the heading: Radical waves stir new hopes for beleaguered Scots Tories. That is a snappy populist heading if ever there was one. But the article contained a direct quote from the Minister, the hon. Member for Stirling, who said: With the position we're in, with socialist policies entrenched in local government and the media, I can't afford to take prisoners. Sometimes paranoia is associated with a Rambo complex, but it is peculiarly inappropriate. The Minister does not challenge those words, but dealing with Scottish education in terms of taking no prisoners is a somewhat unfortunate approach.

I am glad that the Secretary of State made the point that standards were not dropping. My honest impression is that the Minister responsible for education takes a very different view and argues, perhaps more by innuendo than anything else, that there is an undermining of confidence in Scottish education, declining standards, slipshod teachers and inadequate pupils. I do not believe that that is the case, but there is always a temptation for him to say that because it is the only way in which he can justify the present proposals.

I do not think that it is enough for me to argue simply that the Bill is an alien proposition, although that is true. Our objections are root and branch and can be put briefly. Opting out will fragment the school system and make it harder to provide educational opportunity across the social scale and across the range of ability. There is no demand, but a determined Government can create a false demand in certain circumstances.

We all know that certain schools are threatened with closure. It is a very real threat; indeed, the Minister is constantly urging local authorities to think in terms of rationalising school capacity to meet falling rolls. The Minister will say that the Bill contains protection and that under clause 13, if a school is scheduled for closure, it cannot opt out. That is similar to section 52(8) of the English legislation, the Education Reform Act 1988, which states: A county or voluntary school is not eligible for grant-maintained status … if proposals by the local education authority to cease to maintain the school have been published under certain statutory enactments.

It appears that the same protection is being offered in Scotland, but I am sure that the Minister has examined the English experience which demonstrates that that protection is a total illusion. At the last count available to me, there had been 37 ballots in England and Wales by schools wishing to opt out. Of those, 27 were in favour of opting out and 10 were against. Of the 27 schools which voted for opting out, two thirds were threatened with closure. That is one reason which will create similar problems in Scotland if those unfortunate proposals reach the statute book.

I shall quote a source to which the Minister might pay some attention, the report by Her Majesty's inspectorate "Standards in Education 1987–1988" produced by the Department of Education and Science. It states: Plans to reorganise secondary schools, in order to provide more economically and rationally for 16 to 19 year olds, appear to have been slowed by uncertainty over the effects of recent legislation, especially that relating to grant-maintained schools. It is put pretty cautiously, but I find it extraordinary and significant that there should be such explicit criticism of the machinery which has been introduced in England, and which we are now threatened with in Scotland, from such a responsible body of educational opinion as Her Majesty's inspectorate. The fact that it has come to that conclusion ought to make the Secretary of State, if he is prepared to be fair, stop and think again.

We shall look closely at clause 13 to establish when the gate comes down on opting out. Is it when there is a draft plan? Is it when there is public discussion of a possible closure? Is it when a recommendation is made to the education authority? Is it when a final decision is made? I fear that, in Scotland, as in England, unless we are careful—there is no adequate protection in the Bill at the moment—the most common reason for opting out will be the threat of rationalising school accommodation. That is not a good basis on which any school should set out on this experiment.

Schools which take this road will be those that are confident of their survival—perhaps falsely confident. They are the ones that think that they will get additional cachet—the smack of independence without the financial risk. The Secretary of State said that that is an opportunity that does not exist under the present system. I take his point, but it depends on how one looks at these matters. I feel that there will be snob appeal and that schools will try to distance themselves from the common run. I put it as bluntly as that because we have to face up to it. They believe that they can attract funds and travellers, bussed or driven, from afar. The arguments will be social as well as educational, and they will be divisive.

There is the problem of rural areas. The Secretary of State may say that, if a school is the only secondary school in the area, and its opting out would leave a massive hole in provision, that may be a factor that he will take into account when deciding whether to approve opting out. That does not seem to be a big contribution to good educational order or parental satisfaction. The trouble with this exercise is that, if we begin to eat into the universality of provision, we will have a less efficient school system—even arguing the educational case in Conservative terms.

Ministers tell us that costs have to be spread and overheads more efficiently shared. If the Government have their way, we shall be contemplating an educational landscape littered with free-standing schools which contribute little and represent disunity where there ought to be unity. That is not a sensible use of resources. Nobody who has read the arguments advanced by the Secretary of State and his colleagues on these matters would have any doubt about that.

The Secretary of State is to pay the schools, negotiate per capita funding, talk through their financial situation and satisfy their needs, but it is the local education authority that will have to pay because the money will come directly from its budget. That is an unhappy state of affairs. The more generously the grant-maintained sector is funded, the worse off mainstream provision will be. We are entitled to put up a serious warning about that.

Teachers who have spoken to me are worried about their promotion prospects and career structures. They can dodge backwards and forwards between the maintained and the education authority sectors, but they envisage the danger of being locked into one school and the problems that may result from that. We want to consider that carefully in Committee.

We are also worried about the position of auxiliary staff as they will have less protection than teachers under the new set up. That is unsatisfactory, even in the guise of a democratic exercise in parental power. There are points to be made in Committee about the interests of the community and of primary parents, and the odd fact that, by the time a school has opted out, some of the parents who voted in favour will no longer have an interest as their children will have left, and other parents, whose children will enter the school in the year of opting out, will have had no vote. That is one of the many inconsistencies that are built into the Bill.

There is a problem about changing a school's fundamental characteristics. I take the Secretary of State's point that his intention is that, initially, when the ballot shows a majority in favour of opting out, the school's fundamental characteristics will not be altered. I am prepared to accept that he, at least, means what he says about that, but after the first few years—I think that was his phrase—a further ballot can be held and there could then be a change in a school's fundamental characteristics; in the uniform, religion or—a key issue—the means of entry.

I believe that selection is ultimately incompatible with parental choice and that, in his heart of hearts, the Secretary of State knows it. The Secretary of State managed to give the impression that he opposes the introduction of selection in schools that decide to opt out, but he would not be drawn on that matter. I recognise that his tenure of office may be short for all manner of reasons which we do not need to go into and which are irrelevant at the moment, but it would be interesting if he could make it clear that he, a politician who represents a Scottish constituency, would oppose the reintroduction of selection via the back door as a result of the opting out process. Will he give such an assurance?