Richard Lee Primary School

Debate between Tim Loughton and Bob Ainsworth

Tuesday 15th March 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) on securing this debate and on raising an issue of concern in his constituency. I do not know whether this is the first time he has secured a debate in this Chamber, free from the constraints of being a Minister; I know how frustrating it can be as a Minister that one does not get the opportunity to air important constituency matters. However, the right hon. Gentleman has certainly aired one such matter today very graphically, and I appreciate the concern that must be felt by him, by parents and by teachers regarding the state of the school that he described.

The Minister responsible for schools, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), is unfortunately detained with Committee work today, but I will pass on the request for him to visit that school if he is in Coventry, or to meet a delegation. I know that he has campaigned on behalf of schools in the past, and that he is a strong advocate for improving provision for all pupils, teachers and parents.

As the right hon. Member for Coventry North East knows, improving provision is a priority that the Government share. Even in times of austerity, we are determined to make this country’s education system among the best in the world by ensuring that schools prepare every pupil for success. I congratulate Richard Lee primary school on the comments it received in the recent Ofsted report. The dedication of the teaching staff and those signs of improvement are doubly to be congratulated because of the challenging physical circumstances involved.

Our 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. We have taken steps to achieve those aims. The academies programme has been expanded, and we are now looking at the national curriculum with the intention of restoring it to its intended purpose—a minimum core entitlement beyond which teachers can tailor their tuition to meet the particular needs of pupils. By February 2011, the Department for Education had received 323 proposals to set up free schools, and that initiative is progressing. Through such changes, each local area will have a good mix of provision, and parents will have real choices for their children.

As the right hon. Gentleman persuasively argues, school buildings, teaching staff and pupils need to be a continuing part of the investment, and the coalition Government are committed to ensuring that that remains the case. However, we are faced with exceptionally tough circumstances. The appalling economic and financial inheritance left by the previous Government, of whom the right hon. Gentleman was a member, is one of those obstacles. The amount that the Government currently spend on debt interest payments could be used to rebuild or refurbish about 20 primary schools such as Robert Lee every day. We urgently need to reduce the deficit, and the previous Government knew that. They had already set a target of a 50% reduction in Government infrastructure expenditure by 2014-15, but they failed to admit that an impact on school building would be inevitable after such a reduction. Although I recognise the parlous state the school is in, it is not something that happened over the past nine or 10 months. The situation has been in decline for some time, and there were opportunities to address it in the past.

The underlying financial position was not the only element that the previous Government chose to ignore. Since four-year-olds are too heavy for storks to transport, there is generally four years’ notice of a child’s need for a primary school place. A small part of the pressure on places arises from migration and immigration, but the birth rate has been rising since 2002, levelling off for a couple of years from 2007.

Two years ago, Members of the then Opposition highlighted the increasing need for primary school places in a debate in this Chamber. On 3 March 2009, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey), now the Minister responsible for employment relations, consumer and postal affairs, led a debate on the need for primary school places in London. My hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis, now the schools Minister, and my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather), now the Minister responsible for children, also took part. All speakers underlined the need for action to ensure that there are enough school places for the children who need them, and although the debate focused on London, the issue has spread beyond the capital.

Making sure that there are enough places in schools is fundamental; it is the most basic need of the school system. Nevertheless, the Government of the day chose not to treat the matter with the seriousness it required. Instead of tackling the need to which my hon. Friends drew attention, the Government proceeded with their unaffordable and inefficient Building Schools for the Future programme, announcing the entry of new authorities to that programme on 15 July 2009, and last year on 8 March and 5 April, just before the general election.

However, I must be fair to the previous Government. They were not the only ones who failed to respond to rising birth rates and the impending pressure on school places. Local authorities have statutory responsibility for ensuring that there is a school place for every child who needs one, and several authorities have been slow to respond to the emerging evidence of pressure on school places.

As well as being responsible for ensuring that there are enough school places, local authorities are responsible for ensuring that schools such as Richard Lee primary school are kept in good condition. Clearly, that is a particularly big challenge in this case. Schools shoulder some of that responsibility through the delegation of school management to the schools themselves. The central Government capital grant is intended to help, but the maintenance of premises is one of the purposes of revenue budgets. The revenue budget for the 484 pupils of Richard Lee school in 2010-11 was more than £1.5 million, which averages about £80,000 for every 25 pupils—an average class size. Freedoms for schools entail responsibilities and, for every school, those responsibilities include a share of the maintenance responsibility.

However, none of that improves the situation of the pupils of Richard Lee school, some of whom have been having lessons in conditions that no one would regard as satisfactory, as the right hon. Member for Coventry North East rightly highlighted. I was relieved to learn that all the classes are now at least taking place in classrooms. I understand that, as he said, for a spell after the boiler burst, some classes were taking place in corridors, which is completely unsatisfactory.

We are taking a number of urgent and decisive steps to tackle school building needs. First, we have put a stop to the bloated and misdirected Building Schools for the Future programme, because we recognise, as the right hon. Gentleman’s party did not, that the top priorities for investment in school buildings have to be ensuring enough school places and tackling poor building condition—precisely the needs that Richard Lee primary school embodies. Through the work of the capital review that Sebastian James is leading for us, we are developing ways of managing capital that will be more efficient and give better value for the funds spent. We expect the review to report in the next few weeks.

In the announcement of 13 December, £13.4 million was allocated to Coventry city council and its schools for capital investment in Coventry schools in 2011-12. We expect similar levels of funding to be allocated from 2012-13 to 2014-15. The allocation forms part of a national allocation for Department for Education capital of £15.8 billion during the four years from April this year to March 2015. To put that in perspective, the figure for 2014-15 is 60% below the historic high of 2010-11, but the average annual capital budget during the four-year period will be much higher than the average annual capital budget in the 1997-98 to 2004-05 period.

Within the allocations, basic need and maintenance are the areas to which we are giving priority. For 2011-12, the grant to Coventry for new pupil places is £6.5 million and the maintenance allocations come to £5.8 million. It is now up to Coventry city council to decide its priorities for the available funding, having regard to the building needs of the schools in the city and in line with its statutory duties and local priorities.

[Mr Ainsworth]

I seek clarification. I want to make the Minister aware that there are four Hills system schools in the city, two of which are in my constituency. The school that we are discussing is but one of them. He appears to have just talked about a capital allocation for Coventry that in total is about £13 million. He knows that a rebuild of Richard Lee in itself would take about £8 million of that city-wide £13 million pot, leaving practically nothing for distribution to the rest of the city. Is that figure to remain the same, and is my understanding correct that he said we would have clarity on the capital budget within the next few weeks?

[Tim Loughton]

The right hon. Gentleman knows that if we had more money from Building Schools for the Future—if money had been spent much more efficiently on the schools that were built at that time—more money would have been left over in the budget to spend on primary schools that are in a parlous state. I did say that the Sebastian James review will report in the next few weeks—imminently—about how we will approach capital spend in the future. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will be able to take some clarity from that.

The situation is not easy. As I have said, we are in very tight budgetary circumstances, but I entirely recognise the particularly harsh circumstances in which Richard Lee primary school finds itself physically at the moment. I gather that Richard Lee was included in Coventry city council’s original primary strategy for change submitted in 2008 as part of the city council’s primary capital programme. Work on the school was to be a new build project, with an estimated budget cost of £8 million, as the right hon. Gentleman said.

However, the school was not subsequently prioritised in the council’s primary capital programme. That was a matter for the council. Instead, another school was deemed a higher priority due to its condition and the need to address additional pupil numbers. One might wonder about the state that school must have been in compared with the school to which the right hon. Gentleman is referring.

The primary capital programme will not continue beyond the current comprehensive spending review term. Therefore, there will be no opportunity of funding for the school through that route. However, I understand that Richard Lee school is now the council’s top priority for capital investment when funding can be identified.

We know that there are schools, such as Richard Lee, in need of refurbishment that missed out in previous Government capital programmes, and people feel that they have therefore been treated unfairly. We are determined to continue to invest in the school estate overall. It is for local authorities to determine their priorities locally. As I have said, the average annual capital budget during the period will be higher than the average annual capital budget in the 1997-98 to 2004-05 period. However, I recognise that in the short term it will be difficult for schools to adjust to reduced capital funding.

We will introduce a new approach to capital allocation, which will prioritise ensuring enough places and addressing poor conditions as quickly as we can. That model will be outlined in the capital review, which, as I said, will report in the next few weeks. Within the funding available to us, our intention is that the new model will prioritise areas that are experiencing high pressure to increase the number of school places and those with buildings in most need of repair, as would appear to be the case for Richard Lee school.

We are determined to ensure that money is spent on school infrastructure and the buildings themselves, not on bureaucracy and processes, which have claimed too much of the funding in the past. Even when funding is tight, it is essential that buildings and equipment are properly maintained to ensure that health and safety standards are met and to prevent a backlog of decay that is expensive to address. Clearly, the patching of patches that the right hon. Gentleman mentioned is not the most effective way of spending resources.

By stopping Building Schools for the Future projects that were not contractually committed, we have been able to allocate £1.337 billion for capital maintenance for schools, with more than £1 billion being allocated for local areas to prioritise maintenance needs. In addition, £195 million will be allocated directly to schools for their own use. We have also allocated £800 million for basic needs in 2011-12, which is twice the previous annual level of support. We expect similar levels of funding to be allocated from 2012-13 until 2014-15. The capital allocation for this year for Coventry city council and its schools was announced on 13 December, as I said. It is now up to the council to decide how it prioritises its local spending.

I entirely appreciate the right hon. Gentleman’s very genuine and clear frustration with the state of that primary school in his constituency. I repeat my congratulations and thanks to the staff and governors for the job that they are doing in very adverse circumstances. We are determined that in future what reduced moneys there are for capital spend will be targeted at those most in need, in terms both of the condition of the fabric of buildings and ensuring that sufficient places are available, given rising school rolls. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will be able to see from the results of the James review, coming out soon, how we intend to achieve that, so that there may be some renewed hope for his school—now at the top of Coventry’s priorities—to get a better settlement in the future to deal with the problems that it clearly has. I will pass on his request for a visit or for a meeting with a delegation to the Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, who is responsible for schools. Once again, I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on having raised the subject today.