18 March 2005
The Conservative Spring Forum in Brighton, March 11-12
Workload deal flawed, says Collins
Unpublished research by the Conservative party has found that rural and smaller primary schools are resorting to 'drastic measures' to meet the national workload agreement, Tim Collins has told Public Finance.
The shadow education secretary, speaking at the Conservative Spring Forum in Brighton on March 12, revealed that the party's research unit had polled several hundred schools on their experiences of implementing the agreement and the responses had identified 'real problems'.
The agreement, which has been implemented in three phases, passes administrative tasks such as photocopying to support staff and, from September, will guarantee all teachers 10% non-contact time during the working week.
'This isn't a huge issue for larger schools with older pupils, but it is for small schools and rural schools with younger pupils, which don't have the necessary resources,' Collins said.
'Many young children will be left in the sole care of non-teachers for large chunks of the day. Head teachers are already having to take on many more tasks. They can only accommodate this agreement by taking fairly drastic measures.'
According to Collins, the research, which is due to be published in the next fortnight, has shown that some primary schools will have to leave children under the supervision of unqualified teaching assistants for up to two hours a day.
Others are dealing with the financial consequences of implementing the agreement by recruiting newly qualified teachers on lower salaries to replace experienced staff.
Collins said the agreement, which was signed by the government and all the teaching unions except the National Union of Teachers, was not working in its current form.
He pledged that the Tories would 'campaign very hard on this issue'.
The shadow minister blamed the agreement's shortcomings on an overly 'prescriptive and intrusive' approach to its implementation. Collins vowed that a Conservative government would honour the agreement, as it would all existing deals with the teaching profession. But he said it would have to be modified to address the problems the research had identified.
'We will want to have discussions with the teaching unions,' he added. 'But we are not going to present them with a fait accompli. We want them to make their contribution so we can make the agreement work.'
Kent leader calls for long-term funding
Capital investment programmes must be accompanied by funding plans that cover the life of the projects to ensure that the targets outlined can be achieved, Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart has told Public Finance.
The Local Government Association chair and Tory group leader said it made no sense to have long-term strategies that have no funding attached to them beyond the early years.
'At the moment we have 20-year housing strategies accompanied by three-year funding plans. It's crazy, no other country does it,' Bruce-Lockhart said. 'Infrastructure projects need to be funded over a much longer period.'
The Kent County Council leader acknowledged that ministers could not make financial commitments on behalf of future governments, but he said that there were several possible solutions to the conundrum.
Bruce-Lockhart advocated the return of business rates to local control as a way of providing a reliable source of income that could be used to finance long-term capital projects.
He said: 'Even if you make fairly modest assumptions about income levels, business rates could provide a cash stream that would allow for substantial investment in infrastructure projects over a number of years.'
Without such financial stability, he added, the feasibility of meeting long-term targets had to questioned.
Bruce-Lockhart said that Conservative shadow chancellor Oliver Letwin was 'sympathetic' to the problem and he was optimistic a Tory government would resolve it. However, he stressed that Letwin had given 'no guarantees' that he would act if the party won the expected general election.
Tories promise 'real' choice for patients
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley condemned the government's 'choice' policies as a 'tick box exercise' that fail to give real freedoms to doctors and patients.
Lansley told delegates that the 'choose and book' programme, in which patients select which hospital to attend from a list of four or five, still allows the primary care trust to decide where people are treated.
Under the Conservatives' proposals, he said, GPs would be free to refer patients wherever the individual wished to go. As a result, bureaucrats would be removed from the consulting room and genuine choice would be available in the NHS for the first time.
'It won't be unaccountable big government making decisions, it will be local people and local clinicians and they'll be based on clinical need,' Lansley told the session on public services.
'We've got to get the power, the responsibility and the budgets into the hands of GPs.'
PFmar2005
