Infant Class Sizes

Ben Gummer Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chloe Smith]

I would say that they are looking for respect in this debate. They are looking for honesty and for figures to be used responsibly. They are looking for a Government who are putting right the messes of the previous Government. The hon. Gentleman stood up to make the preceding speech, for which I thank him—of course, I should have observed that courtesy at the beginning of my comments—and I thank him for reminding us what schools were like in the years following 1997. I sat in a classroom of more than 30 pupils when I was at school, in a Norfolk comprehensive, so I have personal experience, should the hon. Gentleman wish to hear it, of having been at school under Tony Blair. You are about to remind me, Mr Deputy Speaker, to return to the subject of infant class sizes.

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

My hon. Friend was an infant.

[Chloe Smith]

At one time I was an infant. I shall now return to the point in hand.

We need to set out high ambition for our children from infant school through to the point where our young people emerge into the world. I want children to be told about the stars and to be taught how to get there. I want them to be well educated and equipped with a passport to the world of work after that. I want them to be an asset to their city and their family and to themselves. I want to see our local authority continuing to pull its act together, which it has done in recent years in Norfolk, and I want to see our local authority continuing to apply those high educational standards.

I will continue to work with that authority to ensure that the funding being made available by this Government benefits Norwich and Norfolk children in their infant school experience. I do that because I believe in peace of mind for parents. I believe they deserve the security of a decent and ambitious education for their children. We owe those children and their parents honesty and a responsible approach to their money and their choice. It is the same old Labour party; on the last count, it would spend the same money 12 times over. It is dishonest to do so. It is also disrespectful to knock the choice of hundreds of my constituents who attend free schools in Norwich. The Labour party does not understand parental choice and does not understand good quality. It does not understand the taxpayers or their money. It has no plan on this point.

To sum up, I am backing those parents in Norwich. They want that peace of mind for their children’s schooling. We have made that funding available to put right the Labour party’s wrongs in culling 200,000 school places at the height of the baby boom. This is intensely relevant to Norwich. I want to see this put right for the constituents whom I represent and I want to see those constituents served well, with a better tone of debate than we have seen at times this afternoon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

We have had an interesting and well-informed debate with contributions from hon. Members on both sides of the House, including my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), who is no longer in her place, but who spoke passionately about the waste of resources when her constituency desperately needed school places.

We also heard from the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), who said he worked at the coal face in Swindon for many years and claimed to be above party politics—before launching into his highly partisan comments. My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) said that my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) and I were glad to see the previous Secretary of State go. May I correct him? We were disappointed that he left, because the polls were showing the impact he was having on voters—not just teachers, but parents. Had he carried on, we would have been heading for a landslide. Nevertheless, we now have the continuity Secretary of State.

We heard from the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), who also is not in her place, and from my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton), who, like the hon. Member for North Swindon, served for 10 years as a local councillor, as did I—it is obviously a common apprenticeship for this House. We also heard from the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), who said it was easy to bandy about statistics, and then immediately did so himself, copiously. We then heard, as usual, a common-sense contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman), who said we were looking not for uniformity, but for equality of opportunity. She was exactly right, as she was about how resources should follow need—a point, in fact, that touches precisely on the nature of this debate.

I am sorry that, even after that preamble, the Secretary of State has not been able to return from her live web chat, after opening the debate, to be here for the wind-ups. I am sorry about that, Mr Speaker, and if I refer to her in her absence, it is not through choice.

It is always a bit of a lottery seeing who will turn up to education debates these days, because the Department for Education has become so dysfunctional after four years of being run by a right-wing ideologue and his crazed advisers that we have not one, but two Schools Ministers. One is the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), whom I am sincerely delighted to welcome back to his place on the Front Bench today. Despite our disagreements, we have always got on very well on a personal level, and I am glad that he was resuscitated by the Prime Minister, in the recent botched reshuffle, to placate the right wing of the Conservative parliamentary party. It is his job, we are told by the Prime Minister, to preserve the legacy of his former boss, who has now been forced into a vow of silence as the Chief Whip.

The other Schools Minister—the yellow variety—who seems to have become an invisible man these days in debates on schools in the Chamber, is obviously—

[Ben Gummer]

He is working hard.

[Kevin Brennan]

I am sure he is working hard—in his other job, in the Cabinet Office, dreaming up more fantasy Lib Dem manifesto pledges at the taxpayer’s expense. Indeed, it appears—just to be topical for a moment—that the coalition Government have now introduced compulsory setting, in that the two Schools Ministers are not allowed to be in the same room at the same time. That perhaps explains why the right hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr Laws) is not here with us this afternoon.

However, it would be useful if the Minister in this debate would clarify in his winding-up speech—[Interruption] —after he has finished reading the Parliamentary Private Secretary’s telephone—the whole shambolic issue around setting, which we have heard about today. We have not really had clarity today; we have just had chaos, in what is, after all, the first major policy announcement by the Secretary of State. It would be good if this House were told exactly what is going on, rather than our having to try to find out from Twitter. Despite the Secretary of State’s earlier remarks about not relying on Twitter for such information, we have to, unless we get it in the Chamber, which is where we should first hear of such things.

The first duty of any Education Minister is to ensure a sufficiency of good school places where they are needed. The figures that have been unearthed in recent weeks and which have been highlighted in today’s debate show that the Government have failed in that basic duty. We all remember the pledge, which has been mentioned in the debate, in the 2010 Conservative manifesto, when the Prime Minister promised

“small schools with smaller class sizes”

and said,

“the more we can get class sizes down, the better”.

That pledge has turned out to be as worthless as a Lib Dem pledge on tuition fees, because we have seen a 200% increase in the number of infants in larger class sizes over 30 since 2010, and the pressure on places is growing.