Education and Local Services
Rory Stewart Excerpts(7 years, 5 months ago)
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Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Martin Whitfield), who has made a powerful and eloquent speech on behalf of his truly beautiful constituency, as he put it. I also congratulate the other hon. Members on both sides of the House who have made their maiden speeches today.
I welcome the commitment in the Queen’s Speech to maintaining our 0.7% international development commitment. The new Government have two Ministers of State—one of whom I welcome to his place today—who are working jointly in the Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I wish them well. Greater co-operation between the two Departments is to be welcomed, but I hope that this will be a partnership and not the first step towards a takeover of DFID by the Foreign Office. Shortly before the election, the cross-party International Development Committee reaffirmed, on a cross-party basis, the importance of maintaining DFID as a stand-alone Department, and I urge the Government to continue to do so.
Stephen Twigg
I welcome the fact that the Minister is nodding at what I am saying.
In the recent general election, my pledge to my constituents was to seek a fair deal for Liverpool. Austerity has hit all parts of our country, but it has hit cities such as Liverpool the hardest. Liverpool City Council has faced budget cuts of nearly £100 million since 2010. Merseyside police have lost 1,700 officers or staff, and the Merseyside fire and rescue budget has been cut in half. In the next three years, the Liverpool City Council budget faces a further cut of £90 million. To protect social care, the council made the difficult decision to increase council tax by 4.99% this year, but even with that tax increase it is having to cut social care by £58 million. That is a loss of 5,000 care packages, which will affect some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in Liverpool.
Investment in education is vital for social mobility, community cohesion, and our future economy. There is real concern in the schools in my constituency about the impact of the proposed funding formula. The proposal that was consulted upon last year would result in a loss to Liverpool’s schools of £3 million. The Secretary of State today repeated the pledge in the Conservative manifesto that no school will have its budget cut but, as others have said, the crucial question is about whether that is in real terms. Otherwise, it will represent a cut for schools that desperately need to protect their funding. I urge the Government to maintain the deprivation and prior attainment factors in the proposed funding formula, which are vital for schools in some of the most deprived parts of my constituency.
This is not just about schools; we also need investment in our early years education. Children’s centres do vital work, but there are also nursery schools. I have two outstanding nursery schools in my constituency: East Prescot Nursery School, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this week, and Ellergreen Nursery School. I want assurances from the Government about long-term funding for our nursery schools, which do such a vital job.
Finally, I want to discuss the promised major reform of technical education. There is no doubt that it has been a long-term weakness that goes back decades, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) reminded us. Let us look to countries such as Germany and Switzerland, which have done this so much better than us. I say to the Government, “Good luck with major reform of technical education, but you cannot do it on the cheap.” The biggest cuts in recent years have been to 16-to-19 funding and, in particular, further education. As well as investment in our schools and in our crucial early years education, let us invest in FE, because only then will we achieve the promised major reform of technical education.
Electoral Registration
Rory Stewart Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. He inquired whether there was a mechanism within the rules of order. As he well knows, there is, and he has just used it. It was 31 years three months ago that I first met the hon. Gentleman. All I will say about him tonight is that once a propagandist who seizes his moment, always a propagandist who seizes his moment.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. There is a serious point underlying this matter, which is that the 2% figure is indeed what the UK Government have encouraged every other NATO country to contribute of GDP to defence. This 2% figure is essential both to UK national security and to our international reputation.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rory Stewart Excerpts(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
T8. I thank the Secretary of State very much for the focus that has gone on broadband in Cumbria. We have, however, faced a serious challenge with the European regional development fund. May I have his assurance that we will focus relentlessly on overcoming those problems to make sure that we can get the extension and deliver the broadband, as promised?
Sajid Javid
My hon. Friend has been working very hard on this issue, and I commend him for the work he has done on behalf of his constituents and for bringing this matter to my attention again and again. My Department is working closely with the Department for Communities and Local Government, Cumbria county council and BT to ensure that the problem is resolved. I can also tell him that, following initial discussions, I am confident that the project can be fully delivered to give a great result for residents and businesses in Cumbria.
Rural Schools
Rory Stewart Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
I thank the hon. Member for Copeland (Mr Reed) for securing the debate and for all his leadership on Cumbria. Central to the issue is rurality and sparse population, and if he represents the constituency in England furthest from London, I represent the constituency in England with the most sparse population. We have about 1,200 square miles and some 1.5 million sheep, but not many people.
The central issue to do with rural schools is simply an aspect of the central problem of rural communities. That problem is the relationship between population and area. Since 1997, we can see a consistent pattern throughout almost every area of rural life: a steady push and a clear, unstoppable trend towards the hollowing out of rural areas.
We have two hospitals in northern Cumbria serving 350,000 people. That is normally difficult for the Treasury to justify, and our Cumbrian hospitals have been in receipt of emergency funding from the Government every year for 19 years, bailing out that fundamental structural problem. Our ambulances in Cumbria find themselves drifting endlessly south, towards the population centres. In fact, every morning the ambulance sets off bravely from Brough, but because it is obliged to pick up the nearest possible case and that always tends to be further south, it is somewhere south of Blackpool by the time it has to turn around and go back up to Brough in the evening. The same extends to old people’s homes, post offices, pubs, farms and broadband—we have some of the slowest broadband in Britain—and to issues such as flood protection, which I discussed with the hon. Member for Copeland earlier.
Since 1997, therefore, we have seen a cataclysmic hollowing out of rural areas throughout the country. Nationally, there are now 2,200 fewer schools in Britain than in 1997, 550 fewer clinics and hospitals, 350 fewer police stations and, famously, almost 10,000 fewer pubs—mostly gone from rural areas. It is, therefore, something of a miracle that our rural areas survive at all, when so much of the structure in the modern world seems to be set against them. In the Pyrenees, one can walk through abandoned village after abandoned village, and the same is true in the central United States. It is a miracle that Governments have managed to fight the endless centralising power of the market that tends to drive people out.
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making some powerful arguments. Is not part of the problem—it certainly is in my region—that small rural communities are classified as unsustainable by their local authorities and local development plans, so they cannot expand and support local schools, post offices and so on? The problem is that communities in such areas want to expand, but are not allowed to, and the unsustainable tag becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. The slogan of sustainability is used to cover up a whole series of crimes perpetuated against rural areas by local authorities. Local authorities imagine that there is an incredibly unfair structural system whereby rural areas are continually subsidised by more densely populated areas, and they demand to know why that should be. The reality, of course, is that rural areas are often in receipt of less funding than urban areas, despite higher costs. For example, education provision in Cumbria is £4,840 per pupil, compared with a national average of £5,140, despite the structural problems that the hon. Member for Copeland mentioned, and which I shall continue to discuss. Our communities put incredible energy into trying to keep those assets open, providing volunteer time and free land, but that is swept aside by the centralising tendency.
Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)
My hon. Friend seems to be talking about small schools receiving more than other schools in Cumbria, but the schools that receive much more are those in towns and cities. It is not a Cumbrian fix; it is a national fix.
Rory Stewart
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. Perhaps I was not clear enough. The national average of school funding is £5,140 per pupil. Cumbria is in receipt of £4,840, so the point is exactly the one that he makes. If sparsely populated rural areas such as Cumbria are compared with urban areas, we receive less.
Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent point, and I endorse it by pointing out that we have exactly the same problem in Gloucestershire, where there is the same funding difference between rural and urban areas. Gloucestershire is launching a campaign to put that right, and rightly so.
Rory Stewart
I thank my hon. Friend. The point about Gloucestershire is key. There are many reasons why things tend to get bigger, and why small shops give way to supermarkets, small dental practices give way to bigger dental practices, and small schools give way to larger schools. That is partly because of the regulations that we impose on such institutions, and partly because of pupils expectations and the variety of teaching that they can receive. That is difficult to deliver in small schools. When I look out of my window in Cumbria, I see a school in Bampton that had run continuously since 1613, but has had to close because it was considered to be unsustainable. It is an odd world where something that was affordable 400 years ago is no longer affordable when we are spending so much more per capita on our government.
The problem is size, and we have extremes. Samuel King school in Alston has only 161 pupils, making it the smallest high school in Britain. Why should it remain open? It remains open because it is more than 20 miles from Penrith, across a pass that is closed for many days during the winter. One simply cannot get to Alston, which is the highest market town in the Pennines. A school is necessary there, because students would otherwise not be able to get to school at all. Kirkby Stephen has the smallest high school in the country. It has 406 students, but only 70 are in the high school. Its catchment area covers 400 square miles of countryside, and whatever some fantasist would like to do in the name of rationality, that school provides an essential service.
Such schools face difficulties, because the lack of affordable housing, and the limited demographics mean that it is difficult for them to increase their numbers. Kirkby Stephen school breaks even with about 410 students. It makes money with 415 students, and if the number drops below 400, it loses an enormous amount of money, but it has little control over that because its catchment area is so limited in terms of population, although its size is large.
Almost every one of our outstanding schools in Cumbria—those that I mentioned are predominantly rated as outstanding by Ofsted, and are eagerly signing up for the Government’s academy programme—have continual financial problems. They have generally had to be bailed out by the county council year after year, and are in an uncomfortable position. When they become independent as academy schools, the funding they take on is the base level that they received from the county council, and does not include the emergency bail-outs that they received year after year, so they find themselves running up increasing deficits. That is so in Alston, and in Kirkby Stephen, where the debt is approaching £500,000—the £140,000 a year that it used to receive from the county council was discontinued at exactly the time it embarked on its, hopefully positive, future as an academy school.
I want to make two requests of the Minister. One is that we address seriously the issue of the rural funding formula. We should not allow that to be seen as a selfish attempt by sparsely populated areas, such as Cumbria, to steal money from more deserving people. It is consistent with our general attitude towards rural areas, and our general desire that rural areas should not be seen as places that we want to be hollowed out in relation to health care, transport or education. It is a fundamental commitment of our civilisation to rural areas.
My second request, which is smaller and technical, is that I would like the Minister to provide someone from the Department for Education to work with the boards of governors, particularly at Kirkby Stephen and Alston, on their budgets. They have launched themselves to academy status, and they have great governing bodies with great head teachers, but they could do with a lot of help to understand the budget. They are in a difficult situation because they hear one thing from the county council, and another with their new academy status. They need someone to compare their per capita funding with that of other schools around the country, and to provide technical advice on what would be reasonable reductions. That would be of enormous assistance to our schools.
On those two notes, and with acknowledgement to the hon. Member for Copeland, I thank you, Mr Weir, for calling me.
Rory Stewart
I do not wish to debate statistics, but I am afraid that the idea that the average rate of school closures since 1997 is seven is a severe underestimation. I could name, off the top of my head, seven schools in my own constituency that were closed in the past five years.
Catherine McKinnell
No, but I agree that the hon. Gentleman has made a powerful case for the concerns in the area, regarding the decline that he feels he has witnessed in his area. I feel that all hon. Members today have made a powerful case for state intervention, particularly in such areas, and for serious consideration to be given to how the state can intervene in the market to try to ensure that rural areas do not suffer disproportionately, particularly in the cuts environment that we are facing at the moment. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to the concerns that have been raised today.
Mr Gibb
The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point, but there are very determined parents in all communities in all parts of the country. We have seen that. Many people have been surprised by quite how much demand there has been to set up free schools. The number of applications has been in the hundreds, and although there is a very rigorous vetting procedure that needs to be gone through before people can continue on to a business case, those applications have come from a wide variety of parts of the population—rich and poor, north and south and rural and urban—so if I was the hon. Gentleman, I would not be too pessimistic about who might come forward with such a suggestion. Also, some of the academy chains may wish to establish new free schools in areas where they perceive that there is an educational need, particularly in areas of deprivation, which can of course, as he and the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North point out, be rural as well as urban.
Local authorities are responsible for the maintained schools in their area and as such they can propose changes, including closures, to those schools. Where changes are proposed, the local authority must follow a statutory process that includes consultation of those likely to be affected by the proposals. The proposals are then decided on under local decision-making arrangements by the authority. The Government have repealed the so-called surplus places rule, which obliged local authorities to remove surplus places in their school estate above 25%. Of course, local authorities are still obliged to ensure value for money. When considering whether to approve proposals to close a school, local authorities must have regard to DFE guidance for decision makers. That includes the presumption against closure for rural primary schools. As the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North said, such arrangements were introduced by the previous Government, but in answer to her specific question, this Government continue to support such a presumption. Although it does not mean that rural schools will never close, it does ensure that a local authority’s case for closure must be strong. Of course if local authorities are under a regulatory duty to eliminate surplus places, that would—and did—act as a countervailing pressure to close schools. My right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed made an important point about how circumstances can change.
Rory Stewart
Will the Minister explain what is happening with this long-term trend? Contrary to the claims of the shadow Minister that an average of seven schools a year were closed during that 13-year period, the Department’s figures suggest that the number of schools nationally has fallen from 26,362 in 1997 to 24,605 in 2010. If all these safeguards and formulae are in place to prevent schools from being closed, why have nearly 2,000 gone?
Mr Gibb
I stand to be corrected, but I think that my hon. Friend is citing the figure for schools overall. There was a considerable number of school closures, and we were concerned in opposition about the number of Titan schools that were developing. The average size of a secondary school, and indeed of a primary school, increased during that period. Much of that was driven by the regulatory statutory requirement on local authorities actively to eliminate surplus places beyond 25%. That has now led to problems. The birth rate has risen and there is an increasing demand on primary school places, and we now have to rebuild, purchase or expand primary schools to cope with the rise in numbers.
There is a case for saying, “Why don’t we mothball classrooms, because in several years’ time we could see an increase in the birth rate?” However, that comes at a cost, which local authorities must take into account when they make such decisions. As far as rural schools are concerned, my understanding is that the introduction to that presumption did reduce the numbers of rural school closures from about 30 a year to an average of 11 in recent years. None the less, I stand to be challenged by my hon. Friend at any point.
Rory Stewart
I am so sorry. I hesitate to quote, but the Conservatives’ own manifesto on rural areas based on freedom of information requests to local councils established that more than 400 rural schools were closed between 1997 and 2010.
Mr Gibb
I am rapidly trying to calculate 400 divided by 13. I will come back to my hon. Friend when I am sure that I have all the mathematics absolutely correct, that we are both defining rural schools on the same basis, and that we are not conflating rural and small. I will write to my hon. Friend because I want to know the answer to this question as well.
The protection for rural academies lies in their seven-year funding agreement with the Secretary of State, which requires his consent before it can be terminated.
Let me turn to the issue of school funding. The main funding issue faced by rural schools is that, as they are generally much smaller than schools in urban areas, they do not benefit from the same economies of scale. Our analysis shows that it is small primary schools in particular that need additional support to remain viable. The hon. Member for Copeland and my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border pointed out the discrepancy in funding that Cumbria receives—£4,828 per pupil compared with £5,082 on average nationally. That puts Cumbria 105th out of 151 local authorities. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) has taken an active role, as part of the f40 group—the Campaign for Fairer Funding in Education—in trying to address these issues.
Academies Bill [Lords]
Rory Stewart Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Vernon Coaker
I agree with my hon. Friend; no doubt the Minister will try to pick up that issue in his remarks.
How will special educational needs be monitored? What is the role of the Young People’s Learning Agency? How will schools get help? How effective is the YPLA in respect of the quality of local, centrally provided services? What experience and expertise does the agency have? How will we ensure that all these things are effectively fulfilled? How much will it all cost? Who will be responsible for intervening if a school is not offering effective provision? How will the Secretary of State know that something is not being done? Who would make the decision about any of these failures? There is a huge raft of questions that I hope the Minister can begin to address.
Our amendment is simple. It tries to ensure that a decision is made about the effect on the provision of centrally provided services of decisions about what money should go to individual schools. At the heart of that is the need for better information from the Government about where the balance should be. The amendment seeks to clarify the situation by saying that we must retain sufficient resources at a central level within the local authority to provide the necessary level of support and help for children with special educational needs, notwithstanding that the Bill will delegate large sums to them. What will be the impact of that? It is a leap in the dark—we simply do not know. Frankly, the Government have not provided the level of detail that the Committee requires because they have not had time to do so.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
A man may not make a maiden speech twice. Due to a misunderstanding in Westminster Hall, I appear to have lost my maidenhood, so I apologise to the House. I would like to speak about amendment 71, but very briefly, with your permission, Mr Caton, I would like first to pay tribute to my predecessor, David Maclean of Penrith and The Border, and then bring my remarks back to this important amendment.
In Westminster Hall, I was unable to recognise the extraordinary service that David Maclean paid to this House over 27 years. I thought that I was stepping into big shoes, but I had no idea how large. I remember climbing up a snowdrift in December last year feeling like Scott of the Antarctic reaching an isolated farmstead to find that David Maclean, like Amundsen, had already been there before me, and repeatedly. As I have moved around over the past few weeks, I have seen the incredible care that he paid to his constituents. Every time I pick up a sheaf of documents, I can see that he has written no fewer than 11 letters of astonishing energy and specificity. During the debate over the past two days, I have often heard the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) ask people to answer the question. On the basis of the letters that I have seen, Mr Maclean answered the question repeatedly, and with vigour and honour. When asked, for example, about windmills, he did not simply say, like an ex-civil servant such as myself, “On the one hand, but then on the other,” but instead attacked the technology and the proposal and ensured that people organised as a social committee to oppose it.
Let me conclude on the subject of my predecessor by saying that his greatest moment was during the foot and mouth crisis, when, with his staff, which he and I would call a cromach, in his hand, he moved across our landscape, denuded of livestock, with funeral pyres burning on the border, and defended his constituency—the ancient constituency of the Western March, that ancient mediaeval frontier—like a warden of the Western March.
In relation to amendment 71, I have been charmed by the reasonableness of the hon. Member for Gedling. I entirely agree with him about the importance of special educational needs provision; I have personal reasons to do so. I agree also about some of the dangers that he has mentioned, such as the potential confusion between funding arrangements and the responsibilities defined within the Bill. He and the bodies that he cited are absolutely right to be concerned about special educational needs provision. I am no expert on the subject, so these comments are meant respectfully to him.
As I say, I am not an expert on education, nor am I a lawyer, but it seems to me, as the hon. Gentleman has already accepted, that many of the things for which he is pressing have already happened under clause 1(8)(a). Some of this—again, I am not a lawyer—seems declaratory in nature rather than necessary. The focus on recognition of the condition and the right of appeal is central, but with respect I would say that there is some confusion about the amendment, and that it would not achieve the purposes that he wishes. He has talked at immense length about his concerns over funding, quality, and the definition of low incidence special educational needs. Amendment 71, to my non-lawyerly eye, would not achieve any of those objectives.
In fact, if one listened carefully to what the hon. Gentleman said, one heard him focus repeatedly on the word “mechanism”. He is very interested in process, and on that we have a philosophical disagreement. Instead of beginning from where we are and what academies are actually doing, and accepting that the Bill will improve rather than decrease the performance of academies in relation to special educational needs, he is obsessed with central processes. He seems to believe that local authorities are the ideal mechanism.
Pat Glass
That is a difficult question. The more severe and complex end of SEN is growing quickly, for all sorts of reasons. For example, we are the binge capital of Europe, so why are we surprised when there is an impact on complex and severe needs? I think that the figure is approximately 0.06% of the school population. It is a small proportion. The figure for children who experience some special educational need during their education is between 18 and 20%. That does not mean that all those children have SEN throughout their career. However, vulnerable children who under-achieve are a much greater proportion of the population—approximately 30%.
Let me revert to low incidence SEN. Special educational needs and admissions are the biggest parts of the ombudsman’s work. Local authorities sometimes get them right and sometimes get them wrong. They are the most contentious areas in education. I predict that the only people who will get anything out of this measure will be lawyers. Defining low incidence SEN is a lawyer’s dream. If we do not get that right now, the House will end up returning to the issue later in the year, as someone rightly said, but in the meantime, parents and children will lose out.
Educational psychology is not defined as a service for low incidence SEN pupils. Given the degree of cuts that my local authority needs to make, it is currently looking at what percentage of the educational psychology service it can reasonably cut without damaging front-line services. Low incidence SEN services do not necessarily cover autism—depending on the local authority—educational psychology services, or children with physical or medical difficulties. The Bill mentions “low incidence…disabilities”. I worked in children’s services for most of my adult life, but I have no idea what that means. I guess we must leave it to a lawyer to decide.
One thing that I am very concerned about is that parents are not involved. I have learned over the years to my cost—I have done things wrong in the past that I have learned from—that the most important people in such procedures are parents, but they will not be consulted under the Bill, which is being rushed through the House without any consultation with the organisations that support parents or with parents themselves. Frankly, the Government will come to regret that.
The hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) talked about the code of practice being an administrative issue. If he had a child with SEN, he would not see it that way. The code of practice is about children’s lives and chances, and if we lose it, it will not come back.
Rory Stewart
With respect, I have a sister with SEN. I intend no disrespect at all, but the question we are addressing today is how best to serve such people. When I make a distinction between administration and law, I am making a distinction between the end—our objective, which is to help those people—and the means to that end. I am afraid that Labour Members have confused the two. They imagine that the only means to that end is through the current local authority processes. We agree on the objective and the rights of the child and the parents, but we will achieve our objectives much more accurately if we do not try to micro-manage the process here in the House.
Pat Glass
I accept what the hon. Gentleman says, but his view is not mine. I am opposing the Bill not for the sake of it because I am a Labour Member—I have learned over the years that it is not what makes me noble that matters, it is what actually works for children. If evidence were presented that convinced me that academies will deliver for SEN children or that free schools would make outcomes better for them, I would support them, but with my years of experience, I have serious concerns.
Mr Hancock
The hon. Lady is a formidable supporter for the Minister, and one that the House will have to learn to deal with. She is fighting his corner and that of the coalition very well, and I would probably be grateful for it except on this occasion I do not agree with one word of what the coalition has come up with.
Rory Stewart
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. What is the relevance of this to amendment 71? I do not understand how it is relevant.
Mr Hancock
That is perhaps more of a question for you, Mr Evans, than for the hon. Gentleman. [Laughter.] I give way.