|
====================================================================================
NB. THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND
NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT; BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS-HEARING
AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES, OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS,
THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY
====================================================================================
ON THE RECORD
RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC ONE DATE:
26.11.00
====================================================================================
JOHN HUMPHRYS: Good afternoon. Why
aren't our schools making a better job of educating our children? I'll
be asking the Education Secretary David Blunkett. I'll also be talking
to him about the "new deal" for young people with no jobs. Is it really
all it's cracked up to be? And the Tories' spending plans... do we really
want less spent on our public services? That's after the news read by
Fiona Bruce.
NEWS
HUMPHRYS: Michael Portillo says the
Tories will take less in taxes to spend on public services. But have they
misjudged the national mood?
KENNETH CLARKE: "The public don't want tax
cuts if it's at the cost of quality in their public services, I'm quite
sure they don't."
HUMPHRYS: And we're told that standards
in education are improving. But should we set the standards higher?
JOHN HUMPHRYS: I'll be talking to David
Blunkett about schools in a few minutes. But Mr Blunkett is also responsible
for employment in England and Wales. It was he who brought in the New
Deal that was meant to give youngsters with no jobs and no prospects a
better start in life. The government claims it's been a big success.
By next week they're expecting the figures to show that a quarter of a
million young people have gone through the scheme and found work. That's
one of the five pledges they made on the little card that they handed out
in the election campaign three and a half years ago. Very impressive on
the face of it. But it's not quite that simple. Mr Blunkett is in our
Sheffield studio.
Good afternoon Mr Blunkett.
DAVID BLUNKETT MP: Good afternoon John.
HUMPHRYS: Just a thought about
the unemployment figures first. They rose slightly last month, possibly
only a bit of a blip, might that be the start of a trend though, might
it throw your forecast off-course?
BLUNKETT: Well it certainly won't
throw the specific programme for the long-term unemployed off course because
it was designed specifically to help whether the unemployment figures were
rising or were stabilised. In other words, we planned it, Gordon Brown
and I back in 1995, to deal with a much much higher level of unemployment
at that time. But yes, there was a small blip, there was three and a half
thousand extra in the claimant count, those who are actually claiming benefit.
On the broader European and World count, that's called the Labour force
survey, we were thirty-six thousand down, so you take one and you take
the other and you make your choice.
HUMPHRYS: So, you're going in all
probability then to hit the target that I talked about a second ago, but
what I am concerned about for the purposes of this interview is that you
might be exaggerating the scale of that achievement and the reason I say
that is because it isn't actually a quarter of a million of young people,
who, to use your expression, are off benefits and into work. Fifty-eight
thousand of them went back onto benefits in less than three months.
BLUNKETT: Well firstly, I don't
think Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and myself or my ministers will be exaggerating
where we've got to. We will be celebrating that a quarter of a million
youngsters who'd been unemployment or out of education for more than six
months, this is not just any young person who happened between the ages
of twenty... of eighteen and twenty-four to be unemployed, it's those who
were long term unemployed. We will be celebrating that they've got a job.
Now yes it's true that seventy-six per cent of them have stayed in work
but the rest found themselves unemployed, we know that because we collect
the statistics for the first time. Until we came in, nobody knew what the
devil happened to people after they left what were previously work make
schemes. We now at least know that, we also know that almost as many leave
work in the general labour market, those who are not on specific programmes
such as the New Deal actually come out of work within that same period
of time and in fact the Office of National Statistics are taking a new
revised look at this so that we get this right across the economy. In
other words, we have a flexible labour market, it's nearer the position
in the United States than it is in Europe, people are moving in and out
of jobs more quickly and the real question, John, and for those viewing,
is are we preparing those young people for work, are we making them ready
to be able to cope with those changes to be employable.
HUMPHRYS: But my point was that
those people I referred to had jobs that didn't last and then there's another
large chunk of people, twenty-five thousand who went into jobs that were
heavily subsidised by the government, so in that sense not real jobs because
many of those jobs themselves disappeared after a while.
BLUNKETT: Look, let's not beat
about the bush, this is a major effort to get those who would be out of
a job, out of the labour market, workless for a very long time, prepared
for work, able to take work and able to move back into work quickly if
they lose their job. We have still a long way to go on developing their
foundation or basic skills because we know a lot of the youngsters have
simply not got the literacy, numeracy or information technology skills
they need which is what you are coming to of course later in the interview.
So we have got to get the catch up right, that is doing something about
the legacy over very many years of people not actually having the skills
to hold a job. But I would defend the New Deal on a whole range of fronts,
not simply in terms of achieving the target but actually also ensuring
that we change the culture. You see what we've managed to do, I think,
in the last three years, and what Gordon Brown and Tessa Jowell and I have
been banging on about for a very long time is that if we make it unacceptable
that you lie in bed, that you presume that somebody else is going
to fund you, if you are able bodied and able to work, that you should actually
have to do so, that is a tremendous gain in terms of our broader welfare
to work policy.
HUMPHRYS: And I'm not disputing
that clearly some good things have been achieved as a result of it, what
I am saying is that it hasn't got, as the claim is being made, a quarter
of a million young people into work and off benefits, because many of them
have either gone back onto benefits or their jobs have been subsidised
and of course, very many of them, half of those who are left would have
found work anyway, that is the point that I am making.
BLUNKETT: Well we have a National
Institute for economic and social research study, again we have been robust
in wanting to monitor this and I think one of the things that we will want
to do, having achieved the target, the absolute pledge that we made of
two hundred and fifty thousand into work, is to actually take a close examination
of where we go from here because the number of young people who are unemployed
long-term albeit that it's dropped, obviously have bigger challenges now
than ever before. Let me take the question head-on. Yes, five hundred and
thirty-two thousand have actually touched the New Deal programme, in other
words of this age group, they have come on to it, they have either gone
on to an option: environmental task force, voluntary sector or a subsidised
job, two hundred and fifty thousand have actually gone through, got a job,
over three quarters of them have held that job. I think that's a tremendous
record and it's contributed towards the enormous change in economic circumstance
that's allowed us to reinvest in education, in health and, of course, in
employment programmes. In other words we are recycling the investment we
make in overcoming failure, back into decent quality public services, so
this has a very major economic and fiscal effect, as well as an employment
effect.
HUMPHRYS: But the very reason that
I'm querying these figures, not querying them in the sense - I'm not disputing
anything you've said. What I'm saying is that there are different ways
of presenting these figures, and if you take out of that quarter of a million
those who would have got jobs anyway, or those who are in subsidised jobs
that will ultimately disappear or those who end up on the dole again in
less than three months - Job-Seekers' Allowance in less than three months,
you're left with a much smaller number, something like eighty thousand.
Now, if you then look at the amount of money that you have spent on this
scheme you discover that each of those jobs cost about ten thousand pounds
and what I'm suggesting to you is that that money would have been better
spent had it been more sharply focussed on those young people who are most
in need of this kind of help.
BLUNKETT: Well, firstly the statistics
we have indicate that it's something just under four thousand, not ten
thousand per individual, and of course the longer they're in jobs the more
tax they pay, the National Insurance and the less we -.....
HUMPHRYS: Ah, but that .......
BLUNKETT: We....
HUMPHRYS: But that is based on
your figure isn't it and not on mine, which I think you have actually acknowledged,
that my figure is actually right.
BLUNKETT: Well the National Institute
figure actually also shows that a hundred and sixty-thousand of those youngsters
got jobs faster than they otherwise would, not - which is a different
issue to whether eventually they would have got a job. Bear in mind John
in the mid-eighties a half a million youngsters of this age group had been
unemployed for more than six months. It's down to thirty-six thousand
now. Over a year there were a third of a million - it's down to six thousand,
so the speed with which you get people off unemployment is not only important
in terms of what you pay them in benefit, it's important in terms of what
sort of person they are when they come out of that experience of being
long-term unemployed, so there's an economic, there's a social and there's
a broader labour market issue here about flexibility, about readiness for
work, so let's not dispute that not every one of them has got into a job
because of the New Deal because I accept that fully, but let's accept that
this has been a pretty good effort at overturning a long-term problem of
generational unemployment in areas of greatest need, and of course the
programme is targeted in the sense that you put the money in where the
need is, and we're trying to do that with another programme alongside it,
the employment zones, which started fully in April in fifteen areas and
is working extraordinarily well, that's about providing much greater flexibility
with a job account that can buy training and skills, can buy the equipment,
the materials, can focus the counselling specifically on long-term unemployment
....
HUMPHRYS: And I gather that you're
also now looking at ways of focussing more sharply on those people who
most need the help by sending people into shelters, finding young people
who are sleeping rough on the streets, and then actually saying to them:
look you've got to come out of this and we're going to make you go onto,
help you get onto the New Deal. I mean is that right, are you going to
do that, send people out to find them?
BLUNKETT: There's one or two pilot
programmes in London called Routeways, and they are aimed at looking at
how if you like the cross-agency, cross department approach to those who
are homeless, rootless, unemployed, no training can actually be helped
in a much broader way. The foyer scheme - I don't want to complicate the
situation, has tried this already in terms of offering homes, training,
back-up support, counselling services, all of us are building on the idea
of counselling because if you can actually - I don't mean in the social
work sense, I mean in having a case load, working with the individual,
not just turning up as was the previous system for job-seekers, turn up
at the Employment Centre, actually tick off whether you've been looking
for a job and send you away.
HUMPHRYS: This is a...
BLUNKETT: ... go through with you
what you need and then start doing something about it.
HUMPHRYS: This is a sort of pre-new
deal then if I can put it like that?
BLUNKETT: Yes it is and I think
as we look to the long-term, as Gordon and Tessa Jowell and myself look
at where we're going, we'll need to focus on those not exclusively, because
these programmes are not about those who have got simple major problems,
but those who perhaps have experienced drug problems, perhaps are homeless,
perhaps have got major long-term health problems. Let's enable them to
get out of that problem, rather than presume that we pay benefits for the
rest of their lives as we have done in the past, and that's what happened,
people came up against the benefit system and if they were of working age
they weren't automatically presumed to go into a job, to be employed, but
we'd need to presume that, and the combining of the employment service
and the benefits agency for those of working age will make this easier,
because everybody who asks for money will then be asked to go through the
programme of working out how they can earn their own money rather than
simply taking somebody else's.
HUMPHRYS: So the intention would
be to extend those pilot schemes nation wide would it?
BLUNKETT: It would if they work,
and obviously we want to adapt to what is working best, we want to work
with - they're not for profit, the voluntary sector and for partnerships,
the employment zones for instance that I mentioned a minute ago are substantially
a partnership between the public and the private sector working together,
bringing together the best of both.
HUMPHRYS: And are you thinking
of making hostel places - a lot of these youngsters end up in hostels of
course - conditional on membership of the New Deal, joining up with the
New Deal?
BLUNKETT: Well, we have discussed
with the exclusion unit, the Number Ten exclusion unit, the possibilities
of ensuring that you actually do have something for something in this
area. I've been a long advocate of this, and I know that Tessa Jowell's
been working on it as Employment Minister ensuring that if you are in
need you get the help you deserve and require, but you get it for doing
something yourself. It's investment in a person who is prepared to invest
in their own future, and I think that self reliance and self determination
backed by the strength of the community is the philosophy that we'll be
taking into the second term of a Labour government on a whole range of
issues
HUMPHRYS: Right. Well thanks for
that. Let's leave it there for a moment if we would, because as you say
we're talking about education in the broader sense now.
HUMPHRYS: There's one thing that most
people I suppose would agree on, and that is that we wouldn't need a "New
Deal" or any other schemes if all our children were educated to the highest
standards possible. Sadly, they are not. Tony Blair has always said that
his three priorities are education, education, and education. There is
more money going into our schools and there have been a raft of different
schemes to improve such things as literacy and numeracy. But as Terry
Dignan reports there are still many concerns about education standards,
particularly in secondary schools.
TERRY DIGNAN: Labour says schools have
been revitalised. In primaries basic skills have been raised and classes
for five to seven year olds reduced. Secondaries like Saint Marylebone's
can celebrate, too. This inner city London comprehensive is England's most
improved school. But progress has been slower in other comprehensives.
Ever since this Government
came to power it's been obsessed, and rightly so, many parents would say,
with the need to improve standards in our schools. But the effect on teachers'
morale of the way in which this policy has been carried out is said to
be causing an acute shortage of teachers, especially in our secondary schools.
Teachers feel the Government blames them when schools - typically in poorer
areas - struggle to achieve higher standards. In many other schools - as
the latest GCSE tables confirm - results are improving, often quite dramatically.
But has this been at the expense, as some would argue, of fairness in our
education system?
Most United Kingdom secondary
schools are, in theory, comprehensive. Saint Marylebone's says it has a
wide range of ability. But it's claimed many of the best performing comprehensives
in the GCSE league tables are able to select a disproportionate number
of brighter or well motivated children.
NIGEL De GRUCHY: So although David Blunkett said
watch my lips, no more selection, I think in practice, the Government has
allowed creeping back door selection, according to different criteria,
which places some schools in an advantageous position and they have therefore
done better as a consequence. I don't want to denigrate their efforts,
they've done very well, but let's not pretend that we have a truly comprehensive
system, because we don't.
ACTUALITY
DIGNAN: Labour has proved to be
surprisingly relaxed about selection. Eight-hundred comprehensives will
become specialist schools like Saint Marylebone's and be allowed to select
ten per cent of their intake on the basis of an aptitude for the arts,
for example. These specialist schools - already outperforming other comprehensives
- get extra money for more teachers.
MARGARET TULLOCH: If we're saying that those benefits
accrue and as result those schools do better, then I would say great, let's
have that amount of level of funding into all schools so that they can
all do better.
JOHN DUNFORD: At the moment I think there
is a danger that the government is introducing a two-tier system of secondary
education. The better funded specialist schools and the less well funded
non-specialist schools. That's unfair.
DIGNAN: Labour has named the schools
parents try to avoid because they are seriously under-performing. Saint
Marylebone's head knows how difficult it is to turn a school round. Naming
and shaming, she says, only worsen the problems schools face.
ELIZABETH PHILLIPS: When I came here, however bad
the school was, you told them how good they were, how lucky they were to
be here and you build up the culture of self-respect. Now how can a school
do that when it is being publicly named and shamed?
DIGNAN: But Labour is losing patience.
Nine out of ten pupils at Saint Marylebone's scored at least five A to
C grades in their GCSEs this summer. Less than fifteen per cent achieved
this at a hundred other secondaries, which means they face possible closure
in three years.
TULLOCH: If you do name and shame
schools like that, effectively they close themselves, because teachers,
understandably, if you're being told that the chances are your school is
going to close in three years, the teachers who can, will move and so what
happens is the schools close themselves.
DIGNAN: Inner city schools welcome
the help they're getting from the Government's Excellence in the Cities
budget. But they complain about targets to cut exclusions. How can they
improve results, they ask, when they're forced to cope with disruptive
children.
De GRUCHY: I think the government's
whole policy on inclusivity, whereby it's placed schools under enormous
pressure to continue with these very disruptive and sometimes violent youngsters,
has been quite unrealistic. It's piled an enormous amount of pressure upon
teachers and we do need to have relief.
DIGNAN: Many schools seem unable
to repeat Saint Marylebone's ability to mould a formula for success. Labour
has given some schools a so-called Fresh Start, a policy widely regarded
as having failed. Increasingly ministers are by-passing LEAs, Local Education
Authorities, and bombarding schools, even successful ones, with seemingly
endless initiatives.
DUNFORD: I think that most people
would recognise that in education now we have initiative over-load. That
we in the schools are still putting into effect last week's initiative
and the week before's initiative while you are reading in the newspapers
about next week's initiative.
PHILLIPS: Teachers have to do this
in the time when they are not teaching, when they should be preparing lessons
or marking, they have to do this as well as all the rest of it. And there
is a tremendous amount of it, it is just escalating and this is from a
Government that said it was going to cut bureaucracy and cut the red tape.
DIGNAN: Much of what teachers do
in their working day is now determined by the Government. Schools that
do ministers' bidding are rewarded with extra money. But it's meant schools
have to compete with each other to win whatever funds are on offer.
PROFESSOR ALAN SMITHERS: What is distinctive about this
government is that it is funding them on a 'something for something' basis.
That means that they have to bid - work out proposals. That's generating
an enormous amount of paperwork. A lot of effort is going into getting
those bids. For every successful school in those bids, there are perhaps
ten unsuccessful ones, so a lot of that paperwork is leading nowhere.
DIGNAN: Teachers don't feel loved
by this government. Yet David Blunkett is relying on them to bring about
a transformation in the education system so that all children can compete
in the marketplace when they become adults. He's being warned the effect
of his policies on teachers' morale is causing a crisis of recruitment,
mainly in secondary schools. So there's a shortage in the staff room
with some heads resorting to desperate remedies.
DUNFORD: Well there comes a point
at which you have to say if I don't have enough maths teachers I have to
reduce the number of maths lessons in school and that can't be good either
for government policy or for educational standards. There comes a point
where, as two schools have already said, and may be more will say after
Christmas, I am sorry we can't sustain a five-day week we have to move
to a four-day week.
DIGNAN: Some believe morale would
rise if ministers made fewer attacks on teachers. So in a speech on Thursday
Tony Blair went out of his way to praise them. Those involved in education
- who worry about low salaries for graduate teachers hope it's the start
of a change in attitude.
ACTUALITY
TULLOCH: Government has to be really
careful not to make speeches which can be interpreted as a blanket attack
on what teachers are doing because I think they feel very sort of fragile
at the moment.
DUNFORD: It is important that the
Government loves teachers because they will not deliver the improved results
in what is said to be their top policy priority area of education unless
the teaching force feels loved, unless morale is improved and unless the
Government works with the teaching profession in the pursuit of those higher
standards.
SMITHERS: The heart of the problem
is that teachers simply aren't paid enough. The latest figures show that
the starting salary for a good graduate teacher is two thousand three hundred
below the average for graduates. So an obvious thing to address would be
the starting salaries of teachers.
DIGNAN: These girls of Saint Marylebone's
are the lucky ones. Their school is heavily oversubscribed. Labour is proud
of the rise in standards at comprehensive schools like this and in many
primaries too. It's feared, though, that in other schools Labour's policies
may actually be making it difficult for standards to rise to the level
of the favoured few.
HUMPHRYS: Terry Dignan
reporting there.
JOHN HUMPHRYS: Back to you Mr Blunkett.
Come to those, some of those points in a moment, if I may, but lots of
initiatives we have seen at primary school level. Now, I gather you're
intending to return to grammar teaching, so you're getting cross about
things like split infinitives and all that. Is that right? Are you going
to start taking grammar seriously again, it seems to have gone out of fashion
recently.
DAVID BLUNKETT: Yes, we know that the reading skills
at all levels have improved enormously and I'm very grateful to teachers
for that. We know that writing skills have a very long way to go and I
think that the Office of Standards will have more to say about that this
week as well. We took an initiative in September with a wholly new grammar
guide and this is placing emphasis on punctuation, on spelling, on getting
right the things that make it possible for people to express themselves
clearly, to be understood better and to understand our language better
and if we can bring that about, as we are doing in terms of imaginative
programmes for poetry writing, or essay contests or as we're doing on Wednesday,
celebrating theatre scripts with people who... youngsters who have actually
competed with each other for prizes this coming week, we can make it fun
and not just a drudge.
HUMPHRYS: So you do want to go
back to good old-fashioned grammar lessons, do you?
BLUNKETT: We believe unless you
get the grounding, you can't express yourself properly. Obviously, this
is the foundation of a process, providing the tools, if you like, for developing
education in its broadest sense, the creativity, the imagination, the reasoning
skills that young people need, but without the foundations, they're struggling.
And the honest truth is, it doesn't matter what people say about our initiatives,
you have to judge whether they are working, if they're not, I'll abandon
them, but the literacy and numeracy programmes are working across the country.
There has been a transformation that you may not have fully appreciated
if you only watched your film in terms of what's happened to youngsters.
Now that start in life transforms what they're able to do later.
So I make no apologies
for having placed that emphasis and those resources behind that emphasis,
in getting it right. What I would say is that we have learnt some lessons,
we're very, very aware of the need to reduce pressure and bureaucracy.
We've pledged to reduce by a third the number of documents going out and
of course people have said to me well, all that will happen is the documents
will get longer. So we said, okay, we'll reduce the amount of paperwork
by fifty per cent and we'll set up a panel of teachers and head teachers
to monitor it, they're doing that now and in a month or two's time, we'll
see what the proof of the pudding is.
HUMPHRYS: Right, so you accept
there is an initiative overload, as one of the...
BLUNKETT: I accept that we brought
in many initiatives that were long overdue. My predecessor...
HUMPHRYS: ...but I asked you if
there is initiative overload?
BLUNKETT: Well I don't think the
overload in itself is the problem if it's yielding results. I think there's
overload if people feel that they're bombarded with bits of paper that
are irrelevant and we want other agencies, including local government,
to play their part in not replicating what we're sending out, so we don't
end up with several versions of the same thing being re-written and sent
to teachers. We also want to reduce the amount of data that teachers are
asked to collect. We want, and I made this clear at the same conference
as the Prime Minister on Thursday, to stop this so-called bidding process,
so that everybody has to go through a process of bidding for everything
and the major standards fund, this is over two-billion pounds has actually
made the difference in backing teachers on literacy and numeracy and providing
them with the training courses, the materials, the back up, which is going
on at the moment in both primary and secondary. That fund is being slimmed
down so that schools get it directly and are responsible for spending it,
rather than having little bits to bid for here and there. So I'm very
mindful we've got to get this right but the end product is a much better
educated set of young people and a better educated workforce.
HUMPHRYS: You think obviously that
these beacon schools, most of them are primary schools, they're terribly
important. You want to expand their roles, those schools that sort of
do things right and then spread out the message to others, go and help
other schools.
BLUNKETT: Yes, we've got a target
of three-hundred beacon schools, specifically for writing, with a total
of a thousand beacon schools across the country, thirty-eight more I shall
be announcing this coming week. They have extra money, averaging about
thirty-five thousand, specifically to spread best practice to other schools.
Many of our initiatives, including the Excellence in Cities programme
that provides learning support units so that kids are taken out of the
classroom but not on to the street when they're causing disruption, the
gifted and talented programmes. These programmes are additional, but they're
intended to allow schools to share, so the idea that there will be a few
favoured schools and the rest will go to the wall is precisely the problem
we inherited, not the one that we are putting in place, quite the opposite.
HUMPHRYS: But, I mean, there are
favoured schools, clearly, whether you call them specialist schools, or
whatever you call them, they do get extra money, and the danger is, I mean,
you used to be against extra funding grant maintained schools and that
sort of thing, and the danger is, as Mr Dunford said in that film, from
the Secondary Heads Association, that you end up with a two-tier system
and that's what he believes is developing and other people are saying the
same.
BLUNKETT: Well, he is saying it,
he says it regularly, I hear him all the time saying it, but...
HUMPHRYS: ...well, you know, he
knows what he's talking about he's in the business....
BLUNKETT; ...well what I want to
hear from John Dunford and what I want to hear from Nigel De Gruchy and
all the other union leaders that you paraded, is not whinging, I want the
answers.
HUMPHRYS: ...but they're stating
a fact...
BLUNKETT: ...I want to know what
they would do if they were in my job...
HUMPHRYS: ...spread the money more
evenly, is what they're saying. They're saying that some schools get more,
it's a fact, it's not a question of an assertion, it is a fact that many
schools, some schools, get much more money than others. I've got some of
the figures in front of me, thousand pounds plus, a hundred and twenty,
ten-thousand pounds, plus a hundred and... - I'll get it right in a minute
- a hundred thousand pounds, plus a hundred and twenty-three pounds per
pupil, I mean that is serious money for special schools...
BLUNKETT: ... yes they do, and
a third of it is specifically for them to share their gains, whether it's
technology or art or sport or music or language that they actually share
it with neighbouring schools. This is a programme about bringing schools
together, so is Excellence in Cities, so are the action zones that we established
very quickly when we got up. You see that Marylebone school that was referred
to several times, benefits from being in Excellence in Cities and therefore
gets extra money, but also benefits from being in inner London, so five-hundred-and-forty
pounds per pupil has gone, extra, has gone into that school, not because
it's a specialist school alone, but because it happens to be in one of
the best funded boroughs in the country in one of the Excellence in Cities
areas, designed specifically to back those areas with greatest depravation...
HUMPHRYS: ...but this is the whole
point...
BLUNKETT: ...John Dunford's arguing
about putting money into Excellence in Cities, I need to hear from him,
because I've got to put more money into those schools with the biggest
challenge, facing the biggest difficulty.
HUMPHRYS: Well, yeah, but I mean,
what people are saying is fine to reinforce success, but if you 'name and
shame' the other schools, you are then reinforcing their failure and it
is an obvious fact that the more money a school gets, the better chance
it has, of course it depends on the head teacher and the teachers, but
the better chance it has of being a good school.
BLUNKETT: Well I haven't named
and shamed any schools, there were eighteen and the Socialist Workers Party
dubbed it "naming and shaming", I'm sorry to hear those who are doing extremely
well out of the system repeating it. We named eighteen schools that had
been on special measures for so long that parents were literally voting
with their feet, drifting away from the school. What we said afterwards
was, now we've got these programmes in place you have two years to get
off special measures, we've got six hundred schools off special measures
over the last two years. A hundred have been closed, we are tackling failure,
if you don't do it within two years, if you don't get off special measures
within two years, we will look at either closing or giving you a fresh
start.
HUMPHRYS: But that's putting them
on death row isn't it, that's effectively saying to their teachers, look
you might as well clear off now, and that's what a lot of them do, so you
reinforce the favour of the school.
BLUNKETT: Well in the past, the
school just died, it literally died as parents moved their sons and daughters
away...
HUMPHRYS: ...same effect, you kill
it off...
BLUNKETT: ...and the other children
struggled. Well I've got one very simple question for everybody listening,
if your child and it happened to mine, my oldest son when we first sent
him to comprehensive school, if your child goes to a school where only
fifteen per cent or less of the pupils get five good GCSEs, do you want
us to do something drastic about it and I'll ask you another question,
would you send your child knowingly to a school where eighty-five per cent
plus of the pupils didn't gain five or more decent GCSEs?. I did, and
I did something about it in working with the school but I honestly don't
expect other parents to answer yes unless they know that with extra cash,
extra backing, determined effort by teachers, by good heads and by us centrally,
we are going to transform that school. In other words, we can sit on our
hands and do nothing or we can give every child, wherever they are, a decent
start in life.
HUMPHRYS: Well that's of course
what everybody would say, let's do the latter, but you...
BLUNKETT: It's not what everybody
has been doing, that's the problem.
HUMPHRYS: What they are saying
is that not only are you treating these specialist schools financially
better than others and that has a knock-on effect on those who don't get
that help, but you are also allowing and this is something you said you
would never do, you are also allowing a degree of selection. I mean specialist
schools are allowed effectively to select by aptitude. Alright I know the
word is aptitude, as opposed to exams or whatever it is but it comes down
to the same thing doesn't it.?
BLUNKETT: Well I think an aptitude
for art or sport is entirely different to an Eleven-plus based on whether
you are good at maths and English at the age of eleven. So....
HUMPHRYS: ...well it depends on
how it is interpreted doesn't it.
BLUNKETT: Well we have to have
a degree of reality here, a very, very tiny fraction of those specialist
schools we have and we have extended them from over a hundred and eighty
- a hundred and eighty-one I think when we came in to around six hundred
now, we've got a target of a quarter of all schools reaching status if
they want it. We ..a very tiny faction of them have used the aptitude test
for things where a youngster has a particular talent and wants to develop
it. Now we have got an adjudicator system so if people don't like it they
can call the adjudicator in and they can made a judgement which is why
a very large number of those schools, there weren't that many of them,
but those schools that were partially selecting have had their partial
selection numbers reduced. So I don't want to go back to the old sterile
arguments that we inherited from the eighties and early nineties. I want
to concentrate on specialism and strengthens leading to sharing of best
practice, leading to raising standards for all children which is why we
are spreading the literacy and numeracy programmes into the early part
of secondary education.
HUMPHRYS: But you see raising standards
for all children is made more difficult for teachers, head teachers in
particular in difficult schools if they cannot exclude children who they
think are making it impossible for them to teach all the other children,
so the vast majority of the children who are prepared to knuckle down and
get on with it are being penalised because it is so difficult for them
to exclude those pupils who ought, in their view, to be excluded.
BLUNKETT: Yeah, we've got a three
stage programme here. Firstly, a thousand learning support units so you
can get them out of the classroom, it is absolutely crucial to do so for
other children...
HUMPHRYS: ..great difficulty...
BLUNKETT: ....well they are taking
shape now. We've got over three hundred of them in place already. Secondly,
if that doesn't work, that we have proper referral units outside the school
with a full educational programme, not two hours average a week which is
what we inherited but to get those children back in, we then propose to
provide a dowry so that they carry extra cash with them into the schools
that are prepared to take them. One of the difficulties is the schools
that have places available that are under-subscribed in the jargon are
most likely to end up with children who have been causing difficulties,
not the well-subscribed, not the succeeding schools, but the ones who are
struggling most and I have got to try and protect them as well if we are
going to raise standards for other children.
HUMPHRYS: And the way Nigel De
Gruchy says you are doing it is by putting pressure, I know you don't greatly
approve of Nigel De Gruchy, you have a lot to say about him, but nonetheless
he talks to a great many teachers and head-teachers and he says you are
putting pressure on the schools to keep these children whom the head-teachers
want to exclude.
BLUNKETT: Well we believe that
we got the pressure wrong and I am very happy and always will be to admit
when I've got something wrong. We got the pressure to the point where head-teachers
believed that they couldn't exclude a child who was causing disruption.
We've made sure that that's now clear, they know where they stand, we still
want to reduce that massive increase in exclusion and permanent truancy
that bedevils our streets, our prisons, our drug population for the years
to come. In other words this is an issue, as with unemployment, that affects
all of us. It's not just for those who are immediately affected, it has
a knock on effect in all our lives, that's why out of the classroom but
not onto the street.
HUMPHRYS: Now teacher shortages,
you've acknowledged this to be a problem, of course everybody accepts that
there is a real difficulty, we talked about, you heard in that film from
Terry Dignan about four day weeks and all the rest of it. There is a really
serious problem here isn't there and at the moment it's hard to see how
it's being dealt with.
BLUNKETT: Yes, there is a serious
problem and had we not acted at the end of March I think we'd have been
very close to melt down. We've agreed to put a total of a hundred-and-eighty
million pounds into new programmes, and thank God they're beginning to
show some fruit. We're not out of the woods yet, but this week we saw
an increase of eight per cent in the recruitment for teacher training.
That eight per cent is differential, so we've still got a problem in shortage
areas like maths and physics.
HUMPRYS: You're way short of you
own target are you there, I mean two thousand odd at the moment.?
BLUNKETT: Absolutely, we'd two
thousand extra teachers up on last year. We've employed almost another
seven thousand teachers over the last two years, so we're actually recruiting
a lot more into the profession, but we need a lot more, because of course
as we expand, as we put extra teachers in to reduce class size, four- hundred-and-fifty
thousand infants in smaller classes since the election, and we want to
do the same at junior level as well. We've managed just to nudge that
down a little bit. As we put more teachers in we're going to have to recruit
more. Now one of the things that is working is the Graduate Teacher Programme
and I'm very pleased that people are coming in large numbers to be trained
in school with a teaching salary that allows them perhaps if they've had
another job to switch over, so mature students coming in as well as the
extra cash that we're giving to all post-graduate trainees - we're giving
them six thousand a year plus a four thousand bonus for shortage subjects
once they take up teaching. Now that is an attractive proposition taken
together with the two thousand pound uplift in salary and the new extra
salaries that they can access in the classroom, not going into management
which is part of our teacher self performance-related promotion reform.
HUMPHRYS: So is that it. No more
money, because a lot of people say, we heard Professor Smithers saying
it there, they want teachers, want and need a lot more money if you're
going to be able to get them into the profession and keep them there.
BLUNKETT: Well, retaining them
will be helped by the new performance-related promotion scales. There's
no question about that. If you can get up to forty-thousand pounds as
an advance skills teacher and stay in the classroom, at least that's a
great deal more attractive than being held down at twenty-four thousand.
But yes, there is an issue and the review body, because we have a review
body for pay and conditions, will be reporting in the early new year.
I believe that we have to balance these thing. We can never actually compete
with consultancies paying absurd in my view, salaries for new graduates
who've got no experience, so we do rely on people wanting to come into
teaching as a profession, because they love the idea of making a difference
to the lives of children into the next generation, but we still need to
reward them well over and above what we're doing, over and above the holiday
entitlement, over and above that pleasure of seeing what they can do in
the lives of young people.
HUMPHRYS: David Blunkett, thanks
very much indeed.
BLUNKETT: Thanks John.
HUMPHRYS: However close Labour and
Conservative seem to have moved over the last few years in their policies
one of the fundamental issues dividing them at the next election will
be public spending. Labour plans to spend far more on our public services.
The Tories say they'll spend less and tax us less. But when they finally
produce the details, will the voters like what they see? Polly Billington
reports.
POLLY BILLINGTON: Christmas is coming, and people
are beginning to think about the presents they'll give. Politicians are
also pondering on what they'd give people after the next election. Labour's
Gordon Brown is offering lots of goodies to tempt the voters; Tory Michael
Portillo is saying he'll spend less money on them as he wants to keep taxes
down - but will people worry that public services would suffer under the
Tories in comparison to Labour?
PAM WATTS: There has been a shift in people's
attitude, that they do want a higher service, we're a wealthier nation,
we expect a higher standard of living. And, more recently it has become
obvious that someone's got to pay for it and people are more attuned to
that.
KEN CLARKE, MP: The public don't want tax
cuts if it's at the cost of quality in their public services, I'm quite
sure they don't.
BILLINGTON: The Tories want to keep spending
below the level of growth of the economy. Independent experts suggest
they'll probably need to spend between five and ten billion pounds less
than Labour. So which areas of government - and therefore which voters
- would find they'd get a smaller present from Michael Portillo than they'd
been promised by Gordon Brown?
ANDREW DILNOT: Between now and the election
campaign the Conservatives are going to have to be much clearer about precisely
how much less than the current government is planning to spend, they will
seek to spend and the areas where they want to get the money from. I think
its reasonable for them to say that they want to wait until nearer the
election before doing that, but they're certainly going to have to do it
pretty soon.
BILLINGTON: The Tories have already said
they won't spend any less than Labour on health. And Michael Portillo's
committed to giving something more for pensioners. Ann Widdecombe's been
promised a generous present from Mr. Portillo for law and order. And the
Conservative Defence spokesman hopes to get more for the armed forces.
So lots of the bigger items on Mr. Portillo's list are accounted for -
which suggests he'll have trouble keeping his shopping bill down. The Tories
believe he will make significant savings by cutting out bureaucracy and
waste.
DAVID HEATHCOAT-AMORY, MP: We want a, a smaller state that does
what it does better with fewer civil servants. I mean the, the, the cost
of central government has grown by over two billion pounds under this government.
There are endless extra civil servants, which are entirely unproductive
in an economic sense. We need faster growing businesses, and fewer civil
servants, and less red tape. And that's why it's gone wrong.
CLARKE: If you're going to make
any real difference when you're in government it is no good assuming that
everything you want by way of extra resources is going to come from cutting
out waste and growth in the economy, they're the easy bits, very nice when
it happens. You've got to make some policy changes and you're confined
in the policy changes that you can make by the desire of the public for
ever better public services - which is right - and by the fact that you
probably have your own policy ambitions as well.
BILLINGTON: So some tough decisions have
to be made by Michael Portillo. And it's not the first time either. He
tried to cut back spending as a Treasury Minister in the early 90s, critics
say without much success. If cutting waste doesn't work, he'll have to
get to grips with spending less on public services than Labour. The Tories
have already marked out Welfare for cutbacks, and right-wingers have other
suggestions about where Mr. Portillo's axe might fall.
JOHN TOWNEND, MP: We have to reform the
social security system, the Labour government promised to do so and use
the savings on Health and Education. In actual fact the expenditure has
continued to soar and its almost a hundred-and-twenty billion. Overseas
aid, forty per cent goes to Europe, I think that should be repatriated
like the fish. We can spend the money better, and they are spending it
mainly in North Africa which is as a result of French influence. A lot
of the money is wasted - we could make savings there.
CLARKE: When I was Chancellor I
set a target of getting below forty per cent of GDP by way of public spending
and we just about got there. Now there were plenty of people who said,
oh, that's er, modest, you must go much further, but of course we shed
blood to get there, and it was all my right-wing minimalist minor government
colleagues who fought for their budgets and made it most difficult to get
that low. There's a level of public service and public support which you
provide in a western European society that's going to make it very difficult
to get much lower than we are now, as a proportion of GDP.
BILLINGTON: Now the Tories have the Trade
and Industry budget in their sights. Privately many Tory right-wingers
believe they could do away with the DTI altogether; that might not be politically
viable, but the man in charge reckons he can slash ten per cent off the
overall budget; more than four-hundred million pounds. That's not just
running costs; it would mean reducing the funding on business support services,
from export promotion to e-commerce.
HEATHCOAT-AMORY: What I've been told by businesses,
particularly small businesses, is that they don't want all these delivery
programmes of an administrative nature - what they want are lower taxes
and fewer regulations. So I'm going to use some of the money which I save
in order to cut business rates, particularly for small businesses. And
I think that would benefit the great majority of businesses, instead of
the comparatively few who benefit from these schemes which are delivered
by the Department or their offshoots.
GEORGE COX: Personally, I think we should
support small business. Small business is very much at the heart of the
economy, and not just being a small business, or creating a small business,
but growing. And if you think, what is necessary to do that, it's spreading
knowledge, making it easier to start a business, providing funding where
it's not required for.., where you can't get it from any other source,
providing knowledge, providing support - that's what small businesses need.
They need that more than a thousand pound off business rates.
BILLINGTON: For a business like Acorn Storage
Equipment in Sittingbourne in Kent, such savings could mean cutting off
a lifeline. Some of the money that would be axed by the Tories funds local
support services for small and medium-sized businesses. Business Link Kent
backed Pam Watts when she relocated and expanded her company, assisted
her in getting a DTI grant and helped shed light on building up her business.
WATTS: If you look at the grant
I've received from the DTI and the advice I've had and the cost of that
advice, it amounts to quite a large amount of money and the sort of tax
cut I'd have to have to replace that would - I just can't see any government
being able to come up with that to be honest. So, no it's not gonna happen
to me. So I'll go for Kent Business Link and the advice they give and any
grants that are available to help me expand.
BILLINGTON: The Conservatives don't believe
the DTI is very effective at picking out what's best for businesses. They
think the energy of the free market is a better way of giving a lift to
the economy.
HEATHCOAT-AMORY: I don't think that politicians
and civil servants are very good at targeting help. I think it's much
better to leave it to the dynamism of the market; leave it to businessmen
themselves to trade, to invest and prosper and export. And they do need
some information on which to do that. There is a role for government but
it's expanded out of all recognition and it's absorbing resources which
should be better used in keeping the burden of taxation down.
PETER KITCHING: The DTI is traditionally
one of the weakest departments in Government, its budget in comparison
with the vast budgets of the DETR and DefE is really quite pitiful for
the job that it has to do. For a government, for any government, that
trumpets that we need an enterprise economy to contemplate in any way reducing
and not increasing, the DTI's budget and therefore the enterprise in the
economy, is clearly gross mis-statement and gross misunderstanding of the
situation.
BILLINGTON: Nearly half a billion pounds
from the DTI's budget is a start but it still leaves the Tories with a
lot of savings to make. There's a problem though; if they're specific about
where the axe will fall, someone is going to squeal. And if they are vague,
Labour can accuse them of wanting to cut popular services like schools
and hospitals and that could damage the Tories at the ballot box too. All
of this is because the Tories hope promising to spend less than Labour
will tempt the voters with the prospect of tax cuts in the future, but
is that what voters really want?
In the political market place many voters are shopping around for the
best deal like these in Kent. The Tories have promised to match Labour's
commitments on health and pensions. They haven't made the same pledge yet
on other popular services. Unless they do though voters may conclude that
services like education aren't as close to Tory hearts as they are to Labour's.
DILNOT: I think the fact that they've
ring-fenced health certainly makes other areas look more vulnerable to
cuts or proposed cuts relative to what the Labour government would do,
but where are you going to make those cuts, education, another large programme,
but education is also an area where I think the Conservatives feel under
some threats. I think they may feel they need to match Labour's spending
on education.
COX: There's very few if
any areas of public expenditure that any of us would really like to see
cut. You don't want to see less spent on health, or less spent on education,
or less spent on defence. So it is very easy to be positioned as cutting
something and then someone some says, "Which of these will you cut?" And
that's a very hard argument to then win.
BILLINGTON: The leader of Kent County Council
has been dubbed the most powerful Tory in the country. Sandy Bruce-Lockhart
controls a budget of a billion pounds and he doesn't cut budgets for the
sake of it. His pitch to the voters in '97 that got him elected, emphasised
spending rather than saving.
SANDY BRUCE-LOCKHART: We decided to make only five commitments
which we knew we could keep. The first thing was to retain and fight for
the retention of our grammar schools. Secondly was put more money into
adult education, into youth education, into our libraries and re-open and
extend library hours and finally to put money into voluntary organisations
and to restart grants to village and community halls.
BILLINGTON: He's also spending money on
family centres like this one he's visiting in Gravesend. He senses that
tax cuts are not the voters' priority in the way they used to be. People
who depend on public services like schools, hospitals and public transport
want their politicians to organise and fund them well and that means investing
for the future. The issue of whether people prefer having a tax cut in
their pockets or a bit more spent on services is something that Sandy Bruce-Lockhart
has researched.
BRUCE-LOCKHART: There undoubtedly has been a shift
over the last ten years. I think if you'd asked that question ten years
ago the answer quite simply would've been lower councils tax, full-stop.
People are now saying, yes, clearly we want our council tax to be low
but we also want to see quality services.
BILLINGTON: But voters have a history of
telling pollsters they prefer money spent on public services yet at election
time the results haven't always turned out that way. Strategists designing
the Tory offering at the next election are hoping that tax cuts can yet
again be their trump card.
HEATHCOAT-AMORY: Tax is still a live and potent
issue - so we are going into the election pledged, over time, to get that
burden of taxation dropping back again; and one of the ways we can do it
is to slim down the process of government itself, cut out the unnecessary
expenditure programmes, concentrate on the front line services that people
want, and help the economy to grow.
CLARKE: When you have a good run
you can deliver some tax cuts but I think people put the economic well-being
of the country before tax cuts and I think they put the quality of their
hospitals and their medical services and their schools and their universities
before tax cuts and you therefore require very good government to be able
to produce tax cuts every now and again.
BILLINGTON: If the voters conclude throwing
money at problems hasn't worked under Labour - maybe they'll conclude money
isn't the answer. But they'll want to be reassured that public services
will be safe before they trust the Tories with the nation's finances.
HUMPHRYS: Polly Billington reporting
there. By the way we did invite Michael Portillo onto the programme to
answer some of those points but he didn't want to join us.
That's it for this week,
don't forget the details of our website if you have one, 'til the same
time next week, good afternoon.
...oooOooo....
32
FoLdEd
|