David Blunkett
Friday 8 January 1999 /
"Well Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much . I am very pleased despite the weather to be in Sunderland who are, I have to say, leading the way in all sorts of innovative features not least the University for Industry; not least the development of a comprehensive Careers Training and Employment Service one stop shop which I opened earlier this morning so congratulations (and they have got a decent football team as well). It’s already privatised so I can’t do anything about that.
You mentioned John that this is the first North of England Conference I have addressed (because my former colleague, well he is still my good colleague) but he has gone up in the World. Stephen Byers was with you last year.
Congratulations to Sunderland on the organisation of what is clearly an excellent Conference and my appreciation for the invitation for people being here at the end of the Conference itself.
You would understand that as the first speech from a platform by a Cabinet Minister since the interesting events of Christmas and the New Year, I want to stress one or two things during my speech about the overall picture, the big picture of a Government determined to carry through its policies to ensure that the programme and pleasures it laid out are going to be carried into practice and to underline that that is in the end what matters to men and women up and down the Country.
I want this morning rather than to harangue you to say a few words about what it is all for: Why are we doing it? Not just announcements about what it is that’s happening or as some people describe it, as soundbites or spin but what is it about? What is it that constitutes the bigger picture?
We are preparing for a new Century. We are trying to modernise and reform our Country to be able to compete in a global economy. We are attempting as a Government to engage people at every stage and at every part of the Country in making it possible for men and women to have a job and to develop security in new ways because employability, the ability to adapt, the way in which people can take control over their own learning.
The development of partnership in lifelong learning is a crucial element in providing new ways of delivering both the ability of people to keep a job and the security that they need for themselves and their family.
We are talking about preparing for that new economy in an age of information and communication technology. We are talking about ensuring that people are equipped wherever they live to be able to access it. We are talking in essence about very long-standing values that I have espoused of setting aside disadvantage and under-achievement, of ensuring that public services are operated and are provided in the interests of those who need them most.
We want to ensure that the real extension of equality of opportunity - the ability to be able to ensure that every child has a chance to succeed - is not simply rhetoric. It happens day in day out in our schools and colleges across the country.
So the agenda is a very broad one.
It’s about an equal chance for us all. It’s about preparing the World of tomorrow. It’s about ensuring that modernisation and reform are not undertaken for their own sake but for the sake of making a difference on the ground. And, of course, it’s about ensuring that we can develop an Education and a Skills and Unemployment Agenda that gives individuals the ability to extend and fulfil their potential - [enabling them to become] acceptable citizens, to have citizenship and democracy taught in our schools so that there is an understanding of where power lies and the structures in which we operate.
We are talking about an education service that will inspire and light a candle of learning for children who would carry that through the rest of their lives.
Above all, we are talking about putting aside complacency. Because let’s face it, [without complacency] there would be no need for us to address some of the issues that we are now tackling. There would be no need for a drive to make this a literate and numerate nation if we were already doing it.
There are countries in the World who can genuinely boast that they have virtually got 100% literacy. We can’t. We can’t even say that two thirds of our 11 year-olds pass into secondary education being able to read and write adequately. We can’t say that they are numerate in a way that enables secondary schools to take them forward and to develop their learning. We can’t say that young people leaving school are in a position to immediately take up a job and contribute to their own well-being, their livelihood and the company they join.
So we have got a struggle in front of us. Not in terms of finding means of attacking each other, but of changing an unsatisfactory situation into a better one. We are in a new environment. Whatever we do in this country, we do it in the context of what is taking place in Europe and the rest of the world. People are moving on. Every step that I take as Secretary of State for Education and Employment has to be in the light of the fact that those who were already in front of us are continuing to move rather than to stand still.
We are talking about developing a coherent jigsaw of plans and programmes that were laid out long before the General Election and have been articulated by me and other Ministers since.
The White Paper which was the first document of the New Government and the subsequent Standards and Framework Act spelt it out in detail. No one should be under any illusions. There is nothing new about what I am saying: new about the way in which we are delivering and the coherence of putting it together.
It is a jigsaw in which every part fits from Surestart and Early Years - in which Local Authorities have an absolutely critical role and the new early years partnerships are fundamental.
The delivery of those nursery places for 3 and 4 year-olds over the next 3 years and the reduction in class size. We have already got 100,000 + 5, 6 and 7 year-olds in classes of 30 or less and we will achieve our commitment and pledges with your help.
We are delivering for the first time in 30 years a coherent programmes of teaching literacy and numeracy. We are providing the support to make it possible. We are undertaking the training. We have the consultancy and co-ordinators in every part of the country and local government has an absolutely vital role in delivering those programmes.
We have the programmes for investing in avoiding exclusion so that children can be supported and helped where and when they need it most - with behavioural support, with the extension of education to those who have been excluded from it.
We have the development of investment at every level in terms of providing the worksheets, the workplans and the wherewithal to be able to do the job and above all, we have the new Green Paper to encourage and support a new view of investment in the teaching profession. Again Local Authorities will have a vital role in ensuring that we get this right, that we listen and respond to the consultation; that we ensure that we can in the words of the three ‘R’s’ that we can ensure that we attract people into the job. We reward, we recruit and we retain those we need to be able to do it in the classroom.
I think that the Green Paper offers a new opportunity: an opportunity to say to those coming in as new graduates, you will be rewarded and you will be rewarded for good practice. You will be rewarded for what you do and not for what someone else is doing but for what you are doing yourself in the classroom.
I would like all of you from today to be able to feed back your own views but I would like to ask you to establish at local level the partnership consultations which will make it possible to hear where people thing we have got it right and where we need to take further steps to ensure that we are responding to commonsense and sensible suggestions.
When I talk about a variety of initiatives, you are all fairly familiar with them. You are familiar with the Education Development Plans and new admissions guidance. We are taking issues a step at a time. It’s not possible to resolve all our problems overnight but it is possible for us in working together to be able to overcome years of neglect and under-investment.
It is possible to provide the leadership from central government, from local government and at school level that makes it possible to transform the service. We know that good leadership in schools is absolutely fundamental. We know that teaching teachers how to do the job better is vital to their success which is why we brought in a basic curriculum for initial teacher training in reading and writing and number and IT for the first time ever in this country.
We know that with the motivation, the aspiration and expectation we can do the job together. And we know that we can engage diversity within the comprehensive system through the development of specialist schools - in partnership with the community and other schools, ensuring that expertise is shared and is available.
We know we can do that by extending the good work that is going on into after school activities and by spreading best practice and we know that we can ensure that wherever intervention is needed, it is in inverse proportion to success.
Very simply we have laid out for schools a programme where failure will not be tolerated, where weak schools will be given the support they need to get them off special measures and out of weakness and into flourishing and supporting the needs of their children.
And we have given the power to Authorities to ensure that they can provide a Fresh Start where that’s necessary for a school.
It should come as no surprise therefore to anyone that we would want to extend that to the service as a whole. It should come as no surprise to anyone to learn that when I spelt out before and after the Election what we were going to do and when we took the powers we needed in the Standards Act, we really meant it.
It wasn’t a case of mouthing platitudes to win a General Election. We will carry out those things I have said we will do and authorised Ministers to say we will do.
And I want to make it clear this morning not just to the Conference but actually much broader to Britain as a whole that that applies to the Labour Programme right across the piece.
It applies whether it’s in the NHS, whether it’s in tackling crime, whether it’s in revolutionising the lack of service that exists in our railways.
In terms of broader public services, all of us have an obligation to make sure that they work in the interests of the people for whom they are intended.
And this Labour Government will inevitably cause controversy, will inevitably upset people by carrying through modern reforming radical policies. But nobody should be surprised because we were elected as new Labour and we will govern as new Labour - and the Prime Minister will reinforce that today in Capetown. He will also ensure that people are under no illusion that education is his top priority. He will pick out education today as the key element in providing the skills and the learning we need to transform our economy and our chance of wealth creation in the New Century.
So nobody need be surprised at all at the fact that I am talking about implementing the policies that were laid out in the School Standards and Framework Act.
One of those policies was that where Local Education Authorities are not adequately providing the support and the service needed for the schools to do their job for children to have a decent education, then we will take action.
As from today, we will advertise for contractors who are in a position to put forward proposals that they feel they can manage in terms of both consultancy and delivery of service.
There are two elements to this programme.
One is the consultancy and support needed. Nobody should be surprised at that because local government is drawing in consultancy in other services all the time, whether it’s implementing the delivery of Information Technology, whether it’s in design or whether it’s in wages. It’s happening all the time.
Then there’s the delivery of the service itself. That element which is assigned to be and shown to be failing through the OFSTED Inspection process - and OFSTED have a crucial role not just in identifying what’s going wrong in schools but what’s going wrong in terms of the support services that make schools work. Ofsted give us the information we need, but so do the Education Development Plans. And so does the evidence we have on the implementation of the literacy strategy. All of them will form part of the backlog for determining what action needs to be taken.
Where Authorities are doing well, we will not only applaud them - as with the reports on Newham and Bury or the work that’s being done in Cumbria in supporting and in enabling failing and weak schools to actually come out of the difficulties. In Lewisham, Shropshire, Newcastle or Bedfordshire, many Authorities up and down this country are helping to transform the life chances of children.
On every occasion we will celebrate good practice. We will spread best practice. We will want people to be able to sing about what they are doing well.
But if they are doing it badly and they have been doing it badly for a very long time, we have one simple obligation and that is to transform the service in the interests of those children and in the interests of the parents who deserve better.
The alternative is to abandon the education service in some parts of our country - usually where there is greatest disadvantage because people who can afford it buy their way out of inadequate services either by going private or actually by moving house.
It is mostly those who are in disadvantage who have had a lousy deal for far too long and I have an obligation and everyone in this room has an obligation not to worry about whether we are protecting particular providers but whether we are providing a decent service for those children. That in the end is the judge and jury of what we do.
So let’s be clear about what I am proposing. Where there is consistent failure to deliver an adequate service we will intervene. We have an obligation to do so. We said we would. We intervened in Hackney without the power that exists in the new School Standards and Framework Act. We weren’t able to do so in quite the way we would have wanted. We had to put together a team at very short notice to do so.
To give us the space to ensure that we can do it properly and to evaluate what people have got to offer, we are taking the steps today to make it happen.
Now there will be local Authorities who themselves might want to offer the expertise that they have. After all, Telford and Shropshire are co-operating in providing school library and special needs services. Many others across the country are helping each other by providing services where they have the expertise to do so.
There will be non-profit-making organisations and of course there will be people in the private sector who think they can do the job. Well, if they can, let’s see what they have got to offer.
Where people are not doing the job, they are now on notice to do it so everybody knows exactly where they stand. That applies whether it’s in delivering the Literacy Programme or the new Numeracy Programme, the resources will be there to back it up to make sure that modernisation isn’t just a slogan but becomes a reality on the ground. We will expect people to be able to do it together.
There is a new role for Education Authorities. I am going to repeat what Steve Byers said last year. I haven’t got a God given right to be Secretary of State for Education and Employment. You haven’t got a God given right as elected members of offices of either Local Authorities or TECs or whatever to hold the job. Nobody has a God given right to hold anything any more.
This is about people showing what they can do but I just want to ensure that we don’t go away this morning with any misunderstanding. If Local Authorities didn’t exist, we have to invent them. I have said it before and I’ll say it now - we might not invent them in quite the form they were in 20 years ago - we put them together as we are trying to with your help in a way that addresses a new century.
Yes, the Early Years Partnerships; Yes, the new Lifelong Learning Partnerships to take on the whole challenge of post-16 Education and Training. Yes, the new support systems to make it work in the classroom where it really matters and to ensure that schools take the responsibility that only they can have for actually delivering in the end the service to children. Yes, an education Authority that is looking for new ways of providing help and back-up whether it’s in ICT or whether it’s in empowering parents or whether it’s in new Learning Centres that pull together as the Careers Service and the Further and Higher Education Colleges have with Sunderland Council here. At every level, people working in partnership and Education Action Zones are part of that process. They are not a threat, they are a promise.