School Funding (Wyre Forest)

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Westminster Hall

12:59

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for coming along this afternoon to listen to what I believe is a very special case for Wyre Forest: its school building programme.

I am very pleased to have secured this debate, as it gives me an excellent opportunity to put on record the case for the funding of school building in Wyre Forest. However, before I get to the main thrust of my argument, I want also to put on record how incredibly grateful I am to Lord Hill, the Under-Secretary of State for Education with responsibility for the Building Schools for the Future programme, who agreed to meet last week with seven of my local school heads, the chief executive of Worcestershire county council and the officer in charge of the council’s estates. It was an incredibly helpful meeting and, I believe, very constructive, and I hope that it bears dividends.

To underscore the argument, it would help if I gave the history behind what is going on in Wyre Forest. Wyre Forest is—or was—part of the wave 6a tranche of the Building Schools for the Future programme. As a result of the cancellation of some 700 BSF projects across the country, Wyre Forest has now lost the rebuild or partial rebuild of five secondary schools. I am certainly not here to argue in favour of the BSF programme. My constituents, particularly those who have had a lot to do with the programme, think that BSF was an overly bureaucratic and unnecessarily expensive way to deliver what is otherwise a very good outcome: new schools fit for the 21st century. Indeed, Worcestershire county council was encouraged by the previous Government to spend about £3 million on the programme, on what have amounted to largely unnecessarily bureaucratic measures. However, in Wyre Forest we are just part way through a major schools reorganisation, and the implications of the BSF cancellation are widespread. It is not just that five schools have had their rebuilds cancelled; as a direct result of the decision by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education, a total of 11 schools in Wyre Forest face an uncertain future regarding their accommodation, and a special school has failed to take advantage of a unique opportunity.

About 10 years ago, Worcestershire county council was instructed by the Department for Education to look into a number of local education issues that were causing concern. In very simple terms, there were three key issues: failing standards and lower-than-average pupil retention into the sixth form; a very small surplus of accommodation; and Wyre Forest’s adoption of a three-tier system of education as opposed to the two-tier one, which was, I believe, used in more than 90% of the country at the time. The county council undertook not one but two consultations among parents, pupils and staff across the whole district, and in April 2005 the county council cabinet took the bold decision to implement what is now widely known as the Wyre Forest schools review. That incredibly bold decision introduced the biggest school changes ever undertaken in this country, and culminated in moving 45 three-tier schools into just 30 two-tier ones.

In August 2007, all 45 first, middle and high schools were closed, and just 30 primary and secondary schools were opened in September. All middle schools and a handful of primary schools were closed for ever. It is important to underscore the enormity of that undertaking. Every child, parent and teacher, as well as all the support staff, were involved in this colossal local change. A third of the education estate in Wyre Forest was closed, never to be reopened. Every member of staff had to reapply for their job, many children were moved from one school to another, and parents had to adapt to changes that they were not expecting. Importantly, accommodation became very cramped across the whole Wyre Forest school system. But my constituents, in a manner that I am finding is typical of them, knuckled down as a group to deal with the disruption, and teachers and other staff made huge efforts to ensure that standards were kept as high as possible and that no child was at any time disadvantaged by the process of change. The past five years have been very traumatic in Wyre Forest, but the light at the end of the tunnel has always been that in the end the district would have education facilities fit for the 21st century—until, of course, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education made his decision to cancel BSF in Wyre Forest.

The knock-on effect of the BSF cancellation has been immense. As I have mentioned, five secondary schools have been cancelled. As I have said, I am not here to argue for BSF, but the vision for the district was far greater. Because of the building programme, the county council made what I believe was a wise decision—that economies of scale could be introduced. Accordingly, three of the secondary schools were to have primary schools located on their sites. Stourport high school, a school rated as excellent, was to have Burlish Park primary school built on its single site. Stourport was built for about 900 pupils, but now accommodates about 1,400 on a split site, with significant numbers of pupils in temporary classrooms. I shall refer to Burlish Park primary school a little later, because it is important in its own right.

Kidderminster’s King Charles I school now has 1,300 pupils on two sites that are 10 minutes apart and separated by a main road. There are 880 pupils on one site and 420 on the other. Only recently, a child was involved in a road accident there, but I am happy to say that it was not serious. King Charles I was to have a complete rebuild, and was to accommodate Comberton primary school on its new single site. Comberton was built as a one-form entry school, but is now struggling as one-and-a-half-form entry and is being asked to become two-form entry this year, accommodating half its pupils in temporary classrooms.

The most visionary development was to have been the learning village at Baxter college. There was to have been a major rebuild, alongside St John’s primary school, of the 70-year-old building, which accommodates just under 1,100 pupils.

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this excellent debate. I attended St John’s first school and middle school, and Baxter college, so I know first hand the importance of delivering improvements and investing in schools. I would, however, politely request that, should my hon. Friend secure any investment, he insist that Baxter college revert to its original name of Harry Cheshire high school.

[Mark Garnier]

I am very grateful for that intervention. My hon. Friend is an example of just how good the education system in Wyre Forest can be: he has come from Kidderminster to Westminster and has done very well as a newly elected Member of Parliament. He raises a very interesting point. The school was initially endowed by Harry Cheshire, a local philanthropist, and due to changes over the past few years it is now called Baxter college. I shall certainly take up that issue with the headmaster; I know that my hon. Friend is very keen on this campaign.

The idea was to have a learning village that contained not just Baxter college and St John’s primary, but Wyre Forest special school. That school would have accommodated, on the same site, the unusually large number of special needs children that, for historic reasons, we have in Wyre Forest, alongside regular pupils.

The three linked proposals that I have described demonstrate an economy of scale that I hope the Minister would welcome, but the vision of the Baxter learning village not only encompasses value for money, but just as significantly teaches the importance of inclusion to all pupils on the site. The special needs school must go ahead irrespective of BSF or any other building programmes for the more regular schools in Wyre Forest, and the county council has therefore had to divert funds to that important resource. That has had knock-on effects elsewhere in the Wyre Forest school building programme. The council has found money from its own resources to build a number of schools, but has had to cancel the rebuild of a further three primary schools: Franche primary school is suffering a split site and the significant dilapidation of its estate; St Oswald’s has manageable problems but is facing a bulge in entry and desperately needs two new classrooms; and Cookley primary is in a class of its own.

I would like to talk about Burlish Park and Cookley primary schools together. These two schools, for me, epitomise all that is good and all that is bad about the primary schools in Wyre Forest. That we are asking teachers and staff to work in these conditions is appalling. That they are doing so, and doing as good a job as they can, is a testament to the incredible dedication of the teaching staff whom I have met both at these and at other schools across Wyre Forest. The two schools highlight the appalling problems that we face locally.

Burlish Park was built as a first school, but it is now taking children from nursery to year 6. Some 470 children have to take lunch in not one, or two, but three sittings. There is nowhere to accommodate children on wet playtimes. Classes are taken in a corridor alongside gym and dance lessons. The school’s pupils cannot congregate together in one go. The staff room is too small to accommodate even a small proportion of the staff, who have to prepare for lessons at home using their own IT equipment. Seventy female staff have just two lavatories between them. We always say that it is not buildings that teach, but teachers. However, if a teacher has to queue for 20 minutes to use the bathroom, that causes classes significant problems. When looking through the school’s 20-page urgent maintenance schedule, the head teacher and I totted up more than £1 million of urgent maintenance work in just three or four pages. The school is derelict.

Cookley has similar problems. The school is based in a Victorian school block and so is arguably better built than the 1960s block at Burlish Park, but its accommodation problems are just as bad. A series of classes in corridors and the building’s antiquated layout meant that the school only just received a provisional pass from Ofsted. That was because the safeguarding provisions were far below standard, but Ofsted was prepared to pass the school because it was due for a rebuild. We can only assume that it will be very unhappy if the situation is not resolved.

These two schools illustrate how the good-will elastic band can be stretched only so far. Staff and parents have had their good will stretched just about as far as it will go. With the cancellation of the rebuilding programme, the light at the end of the tunnel has been extinguished, and that is unfair.

In Bewdley, the high school has had a partial rebuild, but there are dilapidation issues, as well as safeguarding issues where the school grounds back unguarded on to the fast-flowing River Severn. Wolverley high school has its own portakabin village, but these temporary classrooms are rotting and need replacing imminently.

The schools that I have described make up the 11 schools that have been hit by the BSF cancellation. However, Wyre Forest is even unluckier than that. The five secondary schools are part of a wider consortium of schools known as the ContinU Trust, a collegiate trust comprising Wyre Forest’s five secondary schools, two secondary schools from Bromsgrove and Kidderminster college. At this point, I must declare an interest as I sit as a governor at Kidderminster college. Through the college, the trust was to have built a new learning centre on one of the redundant middle school sites, but the project was cancelled in the past 18 months or so as a result of the Learning and Skills Council funding fiasco, in which 144 colleges across the country lost their funding. That loss only adds to the accommodation problems in Wyre Forest.

I am here to plead Wyre Forest’s case on two principal issues: capacity and dilapidation. Across Wyre Forest, 23%—nearly a quarter—of pupils are in temporary accommodation, and that rises to 50% in some of the schools that I have mentioned. Teachers do not have basic needs met to allow them to prepare for classes. They do not have sufficient IT provision or quiet work areas and resource rooms where they can gather their thoughts. They are not given sufficient space to be able to rest in staff rooms, where staff can outnumber available chairs by 10 to one. There are not enough bathroom facilities for female staff, although male staff seem to be doing very well, because there are fewer men, and there is at least one lavatory per man.

Pupils are taught in corridors in many schools. There is little or no storage space for equipment. Many pupils lack sufficient, safeguarded outside spaces. The wider estate is dilapidated. Given where Wyre Forest featured on the priority list—it was part of wave 6a of BSF—the school buildings have generally not been maintained. That was done on the instructions of the county council and, ultimately, the Department for Education, to save resources for the new rebuild. The dilapidation is quite acute, and the cost of carrying out essential maintenance work is immense.

The economies of scale in the building programme still to be carried out are a huge incentive to undertake all the remaining building works in quick succession and to use joint sites, as I described earlier. The plans put forward for Wyre Forest are exciting and incredibly well thought through. Failing to deliver at this late stage would be to lose an incredible opportunity for a comprehensive, district-wide schools building programme.

Officers at Worcestershire county council will work with civil servants at the Department for Education, and they will put a comprehensive and excellent case for Wyre Forest. As I said, I am incredibly grateful to Lord Hill for his meeting last week, but, in my closing words, I ask the Minster to reinforce the message that we are trying to deliver. There is acute dilapidation in the estate and a severe lack of space for staff and pupils. We want the opportunity to deliver excellent value for money through economies of scale by completing the work started almost a decade ago and delivering 21st-century schools for Wyre Forest.

13:14

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) on securing this important debate. I thank him for his strong support for the coalition’s education reforms and his kind words about Lord Hill. My hon. Friend is an exceptionally committed campaigner on behalf of his constituency’s schools. As he has just proved in his speech, he is also a strong advocate of improving provision for all pupils, teachers and parents across the country.

As my hon. Friend knows, the coalition Government very much share that priority. That is why we have made it our mission from day one to make this country’s education system among the very best in the world by restoring confidence in our qualifications and exam system and by ensuring that school prepares every pupil for success. That ambition is based on the simple but profoundly important principles of giving teachers and heads greater freedom, giving parents greater choice, providing higher standards for pupils and reducing the amount of red tape in the system.

As I hope my hon. Friend will agree, the coalition Government have already taken important steps to achieve those aims in their first few months. We have, for instance, expanded the academies programme so that all schools can enjoy the greater freedoms that academy status brings. We are looking at the national curriculum, with the intention of restoring it to its intended purpose of setting out a minimum core entitlement beyond which teachers can tailor their tuition to meet the particular needs of their pupils. We are also allowing parents, teachers and other groups to set up free schools so that each local area has a good mix of provision, feels the responsibility to raise standards in every school and offers parents real choice for their children.

As my hon. Friend argued so persuasively, school buildings, teaching staff and pupils are also important as part of the continuing investment in our school system. The coalition Government are absolutely committed to ensuring that that remains the case, but it is nevertheless critical that future spending in Wyre Forest, and indeed the rest of the country, represent the best possible value for money during these exceptionally difficult economic times.

Building Schools for the Future was, of course, an important programme for the previous Government, who aimed to rebuild or refurbish every one of our 3,500 secondary schools by 2023. That was undoubtedly a bold and impressive ambition, but unfortunately it failed to live up to the hype. During the five years of the BSF programme, just 265 schools benefited. The figure for schools that were completely rebuilt was just 146.

Where BSF has delivered, it has been at an exorbitant cost. As has been pointed out, rebuilding a school under BSF has turned out to be three times more expensive than constructing a commercial building and twice as expensive as building a school in Ireland. While the BSF budget grew from £45 billion to £55 billion, the time scale also grew, from 10 years to a projected 18 years.

Some of the reasons behind that additional cost and delay were understandable, but the fact remains that BSF had become a vast and confusing morass of process and cost upon cost by the time that it was ended, representing extremely poor value for money, as my hon. Friend acknowledged. Indeed, £60 million of the £250 million spent on BSF was frittered away on consultants and advisory costs before a brick was even laid.

Nobody comes into politics to cut funding, least of all a new Government who have inherited a school system that has desperately short-changed so many of its students, and particularly those from poorer communities. We recognise that these things can be extremely frustrating for areas close to the cut-off point for BSF, of which my hon. Friend’s constituency was one. Five schools in his constituency have had to have their BSF programmes stopped, and that has understandably caused real dismay among students, teachers and parents. As my hon. Friend has said, things do not stop there; 11 schools in the area have been affected by the decision.

I am also aware that my hon. Friend has raised the issue of Wyre Forest Building Schools for the Future projects directly with the Department, pointing out the difficulty of operating primary and secondary schools in buildings that were designed for the three-tier system of first, middle and upper schools. He has been and remains a powerful and assiduous advocate of his constituency in the House. However, it is important to stress from the outset that every area in the country has been treated consistently and fairly, with no one authority or community singled out for cuts. In deciding which projects would be taken forward and which would end we developed a single set of criteria and applied it uniformly across the country. Those school projects that were part of their area’s initial BSF schemes and which had reached financial close were allowed to continue, as were the sample projects that were part of their area’s initial BSF schemes, where financial close had not been reached but where a preferred bidder had been appointed at the close of dialogue. Thirdly, a number of planned school projects, in addition to a local authority’s initial scheme, were allowed to continue.

As we have heard today, the BSF projects in my hon. Friend’s constituency were not, unfortunately, additional projects; nor had they appointed a preferred bidder, and therefore they had not reached financial close either. As none of the criteria applied, they could not go ahead, apart from the Tudor Grange academy, which will be unaffected.

I listened carefully to my hon. Friend’s excellent speech and one cannot help but be moved on hearing of the state of the fabric in some of the buildings, where a quarter of the pupils—in some schools half the pupils—are having lessons in temporary accommodation. I have seen the photographs that my hon. Friend brought to the meeting with Lord Hill and I share his concern about the state of the fabric of some buildings. My hon. Friend talked ably about Burlish Park primary school, where there is no accommodation for children on wet playtimes, and where classes are sometimes taken in the corridor, alongside gym and dance lessons. He also discussed Cookley primary school where, because classes are taking place in corridors, there was a risk that Ofsted would fail it on well-being grounds. He makes a powerful case about need in his area.

The end of BSF, however, does not mean the end of capital spending on schools. Money will be spent on school buildings in future, but it is imperative that it be spent on school infrastructure and the buildings themselves, and not on process, as my hon. Friend pointed out—particularly if we are to meet the increasing demand for school places in the coming years as the birth rate rises. That is why we appointed the group headed by Sebastian James, the group operations director of DSG International, to conduct a root and branch review of all capital investment in schools, sixth form colleges and other services for which the Department is responsible. The group is due to report back to us at the end of December, and will be looking at how best to meet parental demand; make design and procurement cost-effective and efficient; and overhaul the allocation and targeting of capital.

That will give us the means to ensure that future decisions on capital spending are based on actual need, which I know is one of my hon. Friend’s chief concerns, and on ensuring that all schools provide an environment that supports high-quality education. However, given the fact that the review is still in progress, I am sure my hon. Friend will forgive me and understand that I cannot make any specific commitments today about how much money will be allocated, or exactly when. I am sure that that will disappoint students at Stourport high school, and other young people who have campaigned so hard for their schools in his constituency. I would at least like to assure my hon. Friend, as well as parents, staff and students in Wyre Forest, that the Department will continue to make capital allocations on the basis of need—particularly dilapidation and deprivation—and that the end of BSF does not mean the end of school rebuilding.

I know that my hon. Friend is worried about the fairness of per pupil funding in Wyre Forest and Worcestershire, as well as about capital expenditure. I can assure him that we share those concerns. We recognise that the spend-plus methodology has provided some stability and predictability, which many schools and local authorities have welcomed, but we nevertheless intend to undertake a thorough review of the current system, which will consider how to fund schools for 2012 and beyond, and look at how we can ensure that each and every school in the country is fairly funded. In addition, I am sure that my hon. Friend welcomes the Deputy Prime Minister’s announcement last week on the fairness premium, which will help disadvantaged students to receive the support they need to reach their potential. That is intended to tackle one of the failings of the past decade in schools, when the achievement gap between the richest and poorest children actually grew. The odds of a pupil on free school meals achieving five or more GCSEs at A to C, including English and maths, currently stand at less than one third of those for a pupil who is not on free school meals doing so.

In conclusion, I ask my hon. Friend to bear in mind the economic background to the matters that we are considering. No one comes into politics to cut public spending, but the Government face a £156 billion deficit—the largest among all the G20 countries—and it is our responsibility, difficult and painful as it may be, to do something about it. In the current financial climate, and with the announcement of the comprehensive spending review tomorrow, we have a particular duty to ensure that we continue to invest where investment is needed, to get the best possible value for taxpayers’ money, and to achieve the right balance between spending and other means of school improvement.

Change will not be effected just through spending decisions, but by the creation of a system that puts more trust in the professionals who work in it. The Government believe that head teachers should have more of a say in how money is spent, and that teachers should have more say in what and how they teach their students. We believe that parents should have a real choice about what school to send their child to. Future spending must support those aims and ensure that money is directed where it is really needed, to pupils, school and staff. Finally, I congratulate my hon. Friend on drawing the matters in question to the attention of the House, and on the conscientiousness with which he has pursued his constituents’ matters with the Department.