Infant Class Sizes

Justin Tomlinson Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris). It was interesting to hear him draw on his experiences on the Public Accounts Committee. That was a good contribution.

I disagreed with the hon. Gentleman fundamentally on one point. He said that education should not be the same throughout the country. Of course, he was right about that. However, education never has been the same everywhere in the country and it certainly did not become the same under the last Labour Government. We actively supported specialist schools and introduced academies. Far more choice was generated by the Labour Government than we are given credit for.

Although neither the hon. Gentleman nor the Opposition want education to be exactly the same, one thing that we do want to be the same is the opportunity for all children. That, plainly, is not the case at the moment. Equal opportunity is not afforded to all children regardless of their background. That is why this debate counts. It is not about a very small area of the garden. We are talking not just about infant school class sizes nudging up over 30, but about what that means for the future. We are talking not just about the children who are now experiencing education in very large classes, but about what that means as it continues. I remember being at school in the ’80s under a Tory Government—we are all talking about when we were educated—when class sizes were much larger than they are now. I do not wish to see that for children who are currently in infant schools. When they get to secondary school, will they still be taught in classes that are larger and larger? The detriment is exaggerated as a child gets older.

I am particularly concerned about this matter because I see the huge disparity between the outcomes for the 7% of children who are privately educated, with the opportunities that they can access—they do very well—and the outcomes for the 93% of young people who are educated in state schools. That issue has been well debated. The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has had a huge amount to say about the critical role of education in providing better opportunities to kids from all backgrounds.

According to the OECD, state primary schools have class sizes with four or more pupils larger than those in independent schools. The difference in secondary schools is significantly worse. Average class sizes in UK state secondary schools are more than double those in independent schools at 21.1 compared with 10.

[Justin Tomlinson]

The hon. Lady is giving a characteristically great speech. I agree with absolutely everything that she has said. Will she therefore explain the logic of the last Government cutting 200,000 places, thus denying people opportunity and choice?

[Jenny Chapman]

When I consider the issue I look at what is happening now, and numbers in my constituency have risen by 66%—66% more infant school pupils are being taught in classes of more than 30. That is happening now, and I am interested in what the Government will do to fix it.

I am a bit like some of my colleagues who said that they did not want to upset the shadow Secretary of State—of course I do not want to upset him. I do not think he would be upset by what I am about to say, but I do not produce a lot of antibodies at the mention of a free school. In Darlington we have a school that is a free school in name only. It was established by a local academy that wanted extra provision for pupils with special needs. We are a pragmatic bunch in Darlington and will go where the money is. These days, if we want capital money, we make ourselves a free school—“Thank you very much, we’ll have one of those.” We have that and it is going fine. There was not a peep out of me as a Labour MP or the Labour council. We will get on with it, and if it gets us the outcomes we need for young people in the town, that is what we will do.

We have another free school that is a little more unusual because it is a private school that decided it would like to become a free school. That got me scratching my head a little—I think that finances may have been a little tight, which may have focused its mind on that transition. However, as a good socialist, the opportunity to take away a fee-paying school and make education available to all was not something I was going to let pass by, and I have worked with those trying to set up the free school and wish it every success. It will be relatively small and will help to provide the additional places that we may need in Darlington, particularly for primary education.

I have listened to colleagues from different parts of the country and it is clearly not the experience everywhere that the additional resources—scarce though they are—are following the additional need. That is where our objection lies. This is not about governance. We are quite relaxed about different forms of governance in education, as we can prove by our record. It is about ensuring that we spend the money where it needs to be spent, so that we do not end up with class sizes creeping up slowly over time.