Infant Class Sizes

Heidi Alexander Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in this important debate.

The ability of parents to send their children to a good local school and have them taught in suitably sized classes is something that the vast majority of British people would deem a pretty basic feature of life in the UK in the 21st century, but sadly in my constituency of Lewisham East it is becoming more and more difficult for families. During the last six years, competition for primary school places in Lewisham has been growing significantly, a phenomenon replicated across the whole of London. A rapidly rising birth rate, fewer people moving out, because of a broadly stagnant housing market, and high inward migration from the other parts of the British isles, as well as internationally, have all contributed to the need for more school places in the capital.

The present Government’s failure to adequately fund extra classrooms in areas with the greatest need means that many parents in Lewisham and London more widely are left wondering why public money is being spent on opening new schools in leafy areas of low demand when their own children are being squeezed into more and more crowded schools. In the last 13 years, the birth rate in Lewisham has increased by 32%. In real terms, that means that approximately 1,000 more babies were born in Lewisham last year than in the year 2001. Since 2008, Lewisham council has created nearly 3,000 more primary school places. The vast majority have been in temporary bulge classes—extra forms of entry, which then move up through the school as the children progress to their next academic year. Only 500 or so of the extra places have been in schools that have been permanently expanded. This is partly to do with funding, partly to do with very constrained school sites, and partly to do with the need to act quickly to meet the demand for extra spaces in the next academic year.

Classrooms have been put up on playgrounds, and music and art rooms have all but disappeared from schools in Lewisham, having been converted into much needed full-time teaching space. Some children inevitably find themselves being taught in classes with more pupils. The pressure on primary schools also means that an increasing number of children are being taught in schools a long way from home. Time and again, whether it be at my advice surgery or when I am out speaking to people on the doorstep, I meet parents who are really angry about their inability to get their son or daughter into a local school.

These are not “pushy parents” who are unrealistically limiting themselves to an over-subscribed outstanding school—although who could blame them if they were; more often than not, these are parents who would be happy to send their children to any one of five or six good local schools. The schools, however, are simply full up, so the children are allocated a place far from home, often involving multiple bus journeys in rush-hour traffic—no small feat in London, with small children in tow. The strain this places on family life can be considerable. I have repeatedly had women telling me that they may have to give up work in order to drop their children off at school. Sometimes siblings can be at different schools, miles apart. Many of my constituents do not have cars, so it can be almost a physical impossibility to get one child to one school and another child to another school on time.

I do not have children, but if I did I could not imagine that navigating long distances to get them to school at the ages of four or five is the sort of start to their education that I would want for them. I understand it when parents say that they want their children to be taught in small schools with small classes and close to home. I understand that, as a parent, one would want to feel confident that every teacher was able to know every child as an individual, to be able to monitor their progress and understand what they are good at or not so good at.

I know that parents do not want to have their children disappearing into a sea of faces at the back of a classroom, but this is the direction in which the current Government seem to be heading. That is not right—not right for the parents, not right for the children and not right for the school and the teachers who are trying to provide education in school buildings that are bursting at the seams. It is made worse by the fact that central Government funding for school places is not going to the areas that need it most.

How this Government can justify opening new schools in areas of low demand when they do not adequately fund the areas with the most pressure on school places is beyond me. Let us take London as an example. We know that the capital has a 42% share of the national demand for extra school places, yet receives a 36% share of basic needs funding. How do Ministers account for that? The money provided by central Government to my local authority of Lewisham to meet the rising demand for school places has quite simply been inadequate for the task.

I am grateful to the Minister for Schools for twice meeting me and the mayor of Lewisham over the last year to discuss the issue. He knows—and I hope to bring this to the attention of other Education Ministers—that the local authority of Lewisham has identified a £19.5 million shortfall if it is to meet all the demand for extra primary places up to 2016. I am aware that in the last round of funding allocations, the Government provided a 2% uplift to London local authorities. It was a helpful start, but even with this, the funding does not fully reflect the additional costs of expanding schools in the capital: there is fierce competition for land, site acquisition costs are higher, and even the costs of construction are higher in London. The Government need to look at the methodology they use for allocating funding. Assumptions in the funding formula about the percentage of permanent spaces created by local authorities recently have worked against local authorities such as Lewisham, where very few permanent expansions have taken place.

The Government also need to start thinking about the looming crisis affecting secondary places. My local authority has opened a brand-new secondary school in the last few years, but anticipates that it will need another by September 2017. Secondary schools do not come cheap, and they do not come quickly. Indeed, London councils have estimated that the capital needs a further £1 billion if it is to meet all need come 2016.

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

I am listening carefully to the hon. Lady’s speech. She has made some important points, but I should point out that the Government have delivered what they have been able to deliver. Between 2007 and 2011, under the last Government, allocation for basic need stood at about £25 million. Under the present Government, it has risen to £78 million, and a further £18 million has already been allocated to Lewisham for 2015-17. I shall be happy to discuss the issue further with the hon. Lady, because I know that she is sincere and passionate about it, but I hope that, in return, she will acknowledge that a total allocation of £96 million between 2011 and 2017 is a very significant sum in the current economic circumstances.

[Heidi Alexander]

I acknowledge that money has been spent; I am just not sure that it is keeping up with the scale of demand for extra places. I believe that there are fundamental questions to be answered about how the Government allocate resources, and how they plan to ensure that future generations can gain access to the education that they deserve.

[Kevin Brennan]

Has my hon. Friend noticed that Ministers never quote the true figures for spending on schools during the period in question? During that period, the last Government recognised that more places would be needed. They provided extra core capital funding of £400 million a year from 2007-08 to 2010-11, and an annual safety valve which included, in the latter years, the allocation of an extra £266 million. Ministers never quote those figures, because this is a smokescreen.

[Heidi Alexander]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. All that I know is that there is a significant problem in my constituency and other parts of London, which the Government urgently and desperately need to address.

We know that the economy in London outperforms that in the rest of the country, and we know that more and more people want to live here. In the next decade, the population is expected to increase by the size of Liverpool and Leeds combined. Just as we need to build homes to accommodate that growth, we need schools to educate our young people. In Lewisham, we are lucky to have outstanding primary schools. Yes, more work needs to be done at secondary level, but our head teachers do inspiring and incredible work. Naheeda Maharasingham at Rathfern primary school, Michael Roach at John Ball primary school and Dame Vicki Patterson at the Brindishe schools federation are some of the most impressive individuals I have met when it comes to the delivery of our public services. I believe that the Government should be helping those impressive individuals to do their job by ensuring that there is adequate funding for school expansions.

The education system does not need money to be siphoned off to areas where there is questionable demand for extra school capacity, and it does not need the uncertainty of children being offered places at free schools that do not even have sites from which to operate. The education system just needs the Government to recognise their responsibilities, and to ensure that scarce public funds go where they are needed most. Parents in Lewisham think that that is a reasonable expectation to have of a Government, and so do I.

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), who had the great benefit of being educated in my wonderful constituency. I think that that shone through the whole of her speech.

I asked to speak in today’s debate. I am normally ruthlessly positive in my speeches—I always try to focus on “looking on the bright side of life”—but when I saw the motion, I was staggered. Indeed, I have been disgusted by the absolute cheek of some of the points that have been made. I speak from experience not only of membership of the Public Accounts Committee—to which I shall refer later—but of 10 years at the coal face as a ward councillor in a new build area, fighting the crazy views of Labour councillors who hated parental choice and did everything they could to force parents to send their children to schools that they did not support.

Let me return to my time as borough councillor. The incompetent, useless Labour council in Swindon, which was so bad the Labour Government had to step in and put it into special measures, managed to rack up a staggering £68 million backlog of repairs in schools. We had schools such as the Moredon primary school where not only were the roofs leaking, but the windows did not fit properly, and kids had to come to school in coats and bring their own buckets—as featured on the TV. It was an absolute disaster and it was a relief that the last Labour Government at least took it away from that hopeless Labour council. Thankfully, we seized control of the council and we immediately started tackling that £68 million backlog for schools.

I represented a new development—an area that, when I first got elected in 2000, had 1,800 houses, but which by the time I was elevated to become the MP 10 years later had 10,000 houses, and every single time we needed a brand-new school Labour councillors blocked it. They blocked it for the same reason that Labour MPs today are putting forward in their interventions and speeches—namely, that there are surplus places in other schools. These were schools that were not good; they were not exceptional, they were not acceptable to parents, and they were a long way away, but Labour councillors, determined to remove parental choice—[Interruption.] The shadow Secretary of State can chunter away on the Front Bench, but this is about parental choice. I have met many angry parents, and having had the biggest swing in the last general election in the south-west, I can assure him that a lot of that was driven by very angry people who were denied the basic right of parental choice in terms of schools.

Continuously, the Labour Government and council sought to build schools after houses were in place, not as part of the infrastructure plan for new developments, because, they kept saying, there were spare places in other schools. That is absolute nonsense.

[Heidi Alexander]

The hon. Gentleman is talking about parental choice. Does he accept that the constituents I described in my speech have zero parental choice? They may choose five or six schools to send their children to, but then be offered none of them. Does he not acknowledge this is a real issue in certain parts of the country?

[Justin Tomlinson]

I thank the hon. Lady for that important intervention, and I can say, absolutely, that is where my anger is coming from. The hon. Lady is experiencing what I went through for 10 years in Swindon. Luckily, in my constituency now 90% of parents get their preferred choice; we are in the top quartile in that respect, and we have done very well as we have expanded, as we saw in the Public Accounts Committee. The underlying point here is that the last Labour Government robbed this country of 200,000 places in the middle of a baby boom. It is an absolute disgrace, and the hon. Lady’s residents are now paying the price. I will come back to this and address in detail what is being done about it because parents are absolutely furious.

We have always had finite resources, but we also had the ludicrous Building Schools for the Future costs. We said to local authorities, “You can go ahead and build schools, but I want every single bid to be unique. I want you to redesign the wheel every single time.” Each and every single bid was costing £5 million in order to reinvent the wheel—money that should have been going to front-line services. The bids took a long time to deliver, they were slow, they were complex and many of them failed, and that, again, caused huge delays in delivering new schools.

The last Labour Government, determined to make sure the current generation did not pay for infrastructure facilities, were obsessed with promoting private finance initiatives, as we covered extensively in the PAC. It was the only show in town. Anyone who wanted to build new schools had to have very expensive PFI schemes. The two flaws with that are that future generations will continue to pay for them—again, robbing money from front-line schools budgets—and that they are incredibly inflexible. As we have started to release additional money to expand the number of school places, we are finding that it is an absolute nightmare to renegotiate the schools with PFIs. Also, because they were privately built, they were often landlocked and space was very limited, even if a deal could have been thrashed out, at great expense to local rate payers.

I was staggered that developers were given the green light to press ahead with developments without providing these places, so time and again people were paying high premiums for new houses—they could see in the plans that a school should be built, but those schools would get further and further behind, creating yet more chaos.

Things are changing, but it takes time—when we have had such a shock to the system, with 200,000 places ripped out of the system, it takes time. I pay tribute to the Conservative council in Swindon, which I was proud to be part of for 10 years. We have expanded Orchid vale, St Francis, Abbey Meads and Haydonleigh primary schools and Even Swindon school; we have incorporated Penhill primary school in Swindon academy and completely rebuilt Seven Fields primary school; and the new Tadpole Farm school opened today for its first wave of new children. That is because our councillors have completely understood and supported parental choice. This Government have helped by doubling the amount of funding available for new school places, and my local authority has ensured that it has been at the front of the queue to get it. This goes hand in hand with other education funding, especially the fantastic decision to deliver fairer funding, from which my local authority has benefited greatly.

The free schools programme has been covered extensively by the Public Accounts Committee, which has been very selectively quoted by the shadow Minister, who clearly does not understand how the free school principle works. It is driven by parental demand. It is not about a top-down approach; it is about local communities having the ability to apply to have a school. The hon. Member for Lewisham East rightly highlighted the next challenges to secondary schools, and we are looking at that in the same way in my constituency. We are using the free school model, which involves parental demand and the need to get 900 signatures from local parents.

It is convenient for Labour MPs to ignore the fact that those involved have to prove that there are no surplus places in either good or exceptional schools within a natural catchment area. We are not building schools in areas where there are already good places. If there are surplus places in failing schools, parents have the right to an alternative. It is fine for those who can afford to choose a private school, but the vast majority of parents cannot do so, and neither they nor their children should be robbed of the opportunity to have the very best education. Let me remind the House that they get only one opportunity.

We have also started to be a lot tougher with developers, and as new infrastructure proposals are brought forward, schools are being built at the beginning of the process. An example is the Tadpole development in Swindon. Before the first house has been moved into, the Tadpole Farm primary school has already opened. It has been completed ahead of the development, rather than afterwards, when demand might have exceeded supply.

Given the failure of Building Schools for the Future, in which each and every school had to spend £5 million reinventing the wheel, we are rightly encouraging the use of modular school buildings. Schools can be the same right across the country; we can use set designs. We have reduced the cost of building a new primary school from £7 million to £3.5 million. The shadow Minister seems to find that amusing, but halving the cost of building a school means that we can build twice as many. That is elementary mathematics.

I am incredibly proud that we have achieved a figure of 90% for preferred choices, and I should like to offer MPs a piece of practical advice that they can take back to their constituencies. Whenever parents do not get their child into the school of their choice, they are incredibly angry. I know of no other issue that has such an effect; it is even more emotive than the threat of a library closure. We started to take schools admissions staff out to parents in the community in the weeks leading up to the parents having to fill in their three choices. For example, a parent might come in and say, “I live on Queen Elizabeth drive, and I would like my child to go to St Francis primary school.” The admissions staff would then be able to tell the parent that, given previous years’ data, that application would be unlikely to succeed. They would tell them still to apply, but also advise them on where the best available schools with surplus places were likely to be, so that they could put them down as their second and third choices. In that way, they would at least be defaulted to a school that they would deem acceptable. By going that extra mile before the applications went in, we were able to work with parents to ensure that alternatives were in place.

I am normally incredibly positive in my speeches. I try not to get involved in party politics, but given that the Opposition have tried to gloss over the fact that the last Labour Government stole 200,000 places in the midst of a baby boom and have the cheek to complain about the results of their actions, I felt that I had to contribute to the debate today, and I have done that.