---

21st Century Schools

I welcome you to your new responsibilities, Mr. Speaker. I also thank the Secretary of State for allowing me advance sight of the statement and the White Paper. We welcome the licence to teach and the principle of the school report card—provided that it is not diluted by a fuzzy focus on issues of partnership, which I think would detract from its ability to hold schools more effectively to account—but I want to ask the Secretary of State about the two issues that give us the greatest cause for concern. I refer to the issue of how all the proposals are to be funded, and the issue of what I thought was supposed to be the Prime Minister's big idea yesterday: the idea of moving from a system of targets to one of entitlements. We saw this morning how the White Paper had been spun by the Government across the media. The BBC website, for instance, speaks of""legally enforceable rights to schemes such as one-to-one tuition"." Yesterday we heard about the right of exit to the private health sector that would be given to people who were not seen rapidly as NHS patients. However, I am not sure what has happened to that idea of entitlements. The Secretary of State's statement made no mention of parental entitlements, and as for the paper that the Prime Minister issued yesterday, not only has it nothing to say about people's rights to leave the NHS and obtain private treatment if their entitlements are not being delivered, but on the issue of enforcement of entitlements to one-to-one tuition, it states that""we will not legislate"" for""redress… through the courts."" That appears directly to contradict the spin that we were given this morning. Perhaps the Secretary of State can explain—in the context of education and, if he wishes, in wider contexts as well—whether the idea of entitlement is meaningful and will give extra power to consumers of public services, or whether it is a bit of spin. If it is not a bit of spin, how will parents denied access to one-to-one tuition for their children exercise their right to ensure that it is received? Our other major concern is, of course, the extent to which the Secretary of State's proposals can be funded. He has promised one-to-one tuition for what could turn out to be 20 per cent. of the seven to 11-year-old cohort—the youngsters who are falling below national standards. Is the money really there to deliver that? The Government promised a year ago that they would deliver one-to-one tuition, and they promised 30,000 places, but we now know that they delivered only 3,500. The Secretary of State has been notably active—more active, perhaps, than the Chancellor of the Exchequer over the last couple of weeks—in talking about the Government's public expenditure plans. However, he has apparently been unwilling to accept that his own budget's real level of expenditure will decline between this year and next year, or that, despite his efforts generously to give away part of his capital budget for home building, the Building Schools for the Future programme will be entirely undeliverable in its existing form against a background of 50 per cent. cuts in capital expenditure across all areas of Government. If we are really expected to believe that some of the aspirations in the White Paper will be fulfilled, will the Secretary of State tell us how on earth they will be funded in the light of the cuts that would have to be made on the basis of existing public expenditure plans?