- The Guardian,
- Friday March 10 2000
It takes a special kind of magic to obscure the best education settlement in decades in the manner of Nick Davies.
Let's start with an independent fact. The Institute of Fiscal Studies confirmed in its Green Budget that "by 2002, Labour will have achieved an annualised real increase in education spending of 3.2%, double that of the last administration and more than twice that of the Conservatives over their entire term of office from 1979 to 1997".
Sustained increases are going into schools in a way which never happened before. The Conservatives had a one-off increase in 1992 and cut spending afterwards. Real spending per pupil fell by £50 in last three Conservative budgets. In contrast, there will be a real terms increase of £200 per pupil in this parliament.
Of course, we are still in the first year of the three-year spending review, so only a magician would expect schools to have seen results of the whole three years before the first year is over.
When we were elected, the 1997-8 Budget (which Davies seems to think I was responsible for) had already been agreed and distributed. With Gordon Brown we took immediate action to give schools an emergency injection of £835m extra cash for 1998-9, avoiding a further £40 real terms cut per pupil.
Nick Davies dismisses increased spending on repairs. Yet twice as much is now being spent as under the Conservatives. With the new deal for schools, over 10,000 schools have already had or are undergoing improvement: much of it substantial. As well as new classrooms for infants and the removal of the last outside toilets, 260 schools are benefiting from substantial buildings improvement or replacement projects through public-private partnerships.
Graciously, Nick Davies concedes that we have increased the standards fund. Yet he has made several errors here too. Few grants rely on bids now. The fund which enables us to provide grants for literacy and numeracy or teacher training has increased from £190m in 1997-8 to over £820m in grant in 2001-2. Some programmes involve 50% (not 60%) match funding from authorities. Others like class sizes and computer funding are funded fully by the government. This is also true from this coming April of the highly popular excellence in cities programme.
Is any of this making a difference? The evidence certainly suggests it is. Standards in the 3Rs have risen as a result of the literacy and numeracy hours. The recent Guardian/ICM poll showed that most primary school parents believed standards in their own primary school had risen as a result. Four times as many primary schools are linked to the internet and schools are being equipped with com puters. Teachers are being trained to use the net.
We are able to fund £2,000 increases in annual pay for good teachers - on top of the annual 3.3% award. Schools in the inner cities have got extra money for mentors to help tackle disaffection as well as new units for disruptive pupils and programmes for able children. I'm acting so that we don't simply leave weak and failing schools to sink as the Tories were happy to do (and as Nick Davies advocated on Monday), but at the same time we recognise that good schools should have the chance to flourish without excessive intervention.
We are spending £140m this year on tackling truancy and exclusions compared with £22m a year under the Conservatives. We are spending £160m this year on cutting class sizes - something ignored by the last government.
I know that further and higher education are often relegated to section two of the Guardian on a Tuesday, but that is no reason for your star investigator to miss them completely in his lengthy and supposedly comprehensive piece. In fact, further education colleges which educate over 4m students have seen their budgets increase from £3.1bn in 1997-98 to almost £3.9 bn in 2001-2. Similarly, extra research funding and more money for standards and access means that universities will get an extra £1bn in spending by 2002, together with £1.4bn for research from the government and Wellcome Trust for research.
Let us imagine two other scenarios. The Liberal Democrats argued for an extra "penny on income tax" at the last election to fund education. Had they done so, there would have been an extra £2bn a year on top of Conservative spending plans - less than half of what we are spending. Had the Conservatives won the election, we would have had even less funding in real terms than in their last Budget in 1997.
Of course we need to make sure as much of the money as possible gets directly to schools - and I have taken steps to ensure that happens. We need to sustain increased investment in the years to come. The prime minister recognises that as much as I do. But it is as absurd to pretend that what is happening now represents little change from the past as it would be to suggest that we didn't need to see more money for education in the future.
• David Blunkett is secretary of state for education.
