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Health and Education

With respect, that is a pretty fatuous question, because obviously I am not. My point is that there is an important distinction between requiring parents to say that their children will accept the ethos of the school and allowing schools to select which children they wish to admit. That is the fundamental distinction I am trying to make. Allowing time for the final speakers in the debate, I would like briefly to make one other point, which concerns the 14-to-19 phase of education. The Government have made enormous progress in the past two or three years on that issue. They have done so 10 years later than they should have done; we should have been grappling with the 14-to-19 sector as soon as we were elected in 1997. Nevertheless, I welcome the progress that we have made. Two issues emerge, however, from the establishment of this as a distinct sector, and from the development of diplomas as the central part of the curriculum in that sector. The first is the question of funding. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will know that for many years there has been an enormous discrepancy—as much as 15 per cent.—between the per capita funding of students in the 16-to-19 phase of education and the rest. I welcome the fact that that discrepancy has recently been reduced; I understand that it is now down to 9 per cent. Given the structural changes in 16-to-19 education and the handing back to local authorities of the funding responsibility, is it not self-evident that we must have a uniform funding system, not only for the 16-to-19 phase, but for the 14-to-19 phase? I would be grateful if the Secretary of State commented on equality of funding between institutions in the 14-to-19 sector. My final point on that sector, and of my contribution, concerns the structures of 14-to-19 education. One of the issues that I found controversial in the 2006 Act was the power of presumption that schools currently without a sixth form could open one. I have raised that point with the Secretary of State before, and I raised it with the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills. As we move to an era beyond 2011 where the annual rise in public investment will be far less than it has been during the past 10 years, the last thing we want is an enormous explosion in the number of new, small sixth forms. All that will mean is that the cost of educating each student will be disproportionately higher, and we will not get the economies of scale increasingly necessary beyond 2011. It has been a concern to many of us that the academies programme, of which I am a strong supporter in most respects, although not every detail, was originally built on the assumption that every academy would have its own sixth form. So, hey presto, there were 400 new sixth forms at a stroke—even though there were not enough young people to fill them. I welcome the fact that that is no longer a requirement of academies and that they can be founded without a sixth form. The majority of our sixth-form colleges perform outstandingly and there has been a rapid improvement in the performance of the overwhelming majority of our further education and tertiary colleges. I am fortunate in having two of the most outstanding colleges in the country in my constituency—the Holy Cross sixth form college and Bury college. I realise that that does not apply to every part of the country, but it must be increasingly self-evident that the most economically effective and educationally advantageous way in which to deliver the new 14-to-19 phase of education is through the college sector, not through the proliferation of small sixth forms. I confidently predict that if the Government do not take this issue far more seriously than any previous Government, perhaps not by the end of the next Parliament, but certainly the one after, we will have to close large numbers of sixth forms because the budget will simply not stretch to cover those costs. Again, I would be grateful if the Secretary of State took this on board and perhaps opened up a dialogue with our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills because it is an issue that obviously covers both Departments. If we are to make the 14-to-19 sector a success and implement our plan to increase the education and training participation age, it is crucial to recognise that it can only be done by strengthening the college sector and increasing the role of colleges in the delivery of that phase. I am afraid that that means a reduction in the number of independent sixth forms.