12^th July 2004

I thought you might welcome a brief summary of the Conservative Party’s national education proposals, as I understand them!

1)      Discipline and pupil behaviour

Conservatives will abolish appeals panels on exclusions. It should be for the headteacher and governors to have a final say on whether a child has to be removed from their school. Conservatives will make major investments in helping to prevent or ameliorate behavioural difficulties in children from a young age, and in providing specialised full-time education for those who do end up having to be excluded.

2)      Cutting Red Tape

All politicians promise to get rid of Red Tape, even the current Government which last year sent 2280 pages of paperwork to every school! So how can Conservatives deliver? By cutting back the size of the DfES and giving the money saved to schools. Paperwork will always be created as long as there are bureaucrats to generate it. In the last three years the Government has hired an additional 88,000 people to deal with schools, but only 14,000 were actually teachers of classroom assistants. Conservatives have said they will get rid of the people who just make your job harder.

3)      Self-government and equal status for schools

Conservatives will set schools free – but equally free. No two tier system. Instead, every school will have Grant Maintained status and be able to make its own decisions about its budget.

4)      Clear, predictable funding

Conservatives will get rid of the 107 funding streams and scrap all the bidding hassle that is currently involved. Instead, there will be one set of funding arriving in the school – clear, predictable and without strings.

5)      A lot more money

Conservatives will increase funding for schools by one third over four years – up from £47 billion in 2005/6 to £62 billion by 2009/10. Money available to head teachers to spend without strings will go up more than this because we will slash the numbers of the DfES and its inspectorates and give the money to you.

6)      Scrapping targets

Conservatives will get rid of the Whitehall targets, information gathering exercises and ministerial initiatives which take up so much time and add precious little to quality education

7)      Admissions

Contrary to what you might have heard, Conservatives are not going to force any school to scrap its catchment area, embrace selection, or, take more pupils than it wants. If you are happy with how you currently arrange things then you can keep them just the way they are. But Conservatives will remove the power of any Secretary of State to tell you how to run your admissions policy – that will be entirely up to you and your local community. And if you are oversubscribed and want to grow, Conservatives will provide the necessary cash, upfront, to allow you to do so.

8)      Easing pressure  on small and rural schools

For decades the Treasury has insisted on moving towards a target of exactly balancing the number of school places across the country with the number of children needing those places. The squeeze on surplus places has led to Britain losing many good schools. Many more are under threat. Conservatives will throw this policy into reverse. Conservatives will fund an extra 600,000 school places in a four year term, this will ensure that an additional 100,000 more parents can get their first choice of school in that period. This will provide a decisive lifeline to many small and rural schools that have an uncertain future under the present regime.

9)      The Right to Choose

Today Britain has the most unequal education system in the European Union, the biggest gap between the most and least successful schools and the biggest gap between the most and least successful pupils. The present system should not be defended on egalitarian grounds, because it has been shown most decisively to fail on egalitarian grounds! Conservatives will take a leaf out of policies which work successfully in countries very like ours, northern European, with a strong welfare state and a powerful sense of community. In the Netherlands and Sweden school choice raises standards not for a few, but for all. Conservatives are confident it will do so in Britain too.

If you have any questions about the above policies please feel free to contact me at anytime on 07866 719923. I do not profess to know the minutiae of Conservative policy, however, I will do my best to get an answer for you.

Yours sincerely

GORDON HENDERSON