(by Private Notice) asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he will make a statement about the collision between the British vessel" Royston Grange" and the Liberian vessel" Tien Chee" and the fate of the survivors.

I regret to have to tell the House that the British cargo ship s.s." Royston Grange" was in collision yesterday morning in the River Plate with the Liberian tanker" Tien Chee with what appears to be very serious loss of life. I know that the House will wish to join me in expressing sympathy with the relatives of those who have lost their lives. My right hon. Friend has ordered an immediate preliminary inquiry into this disaster, and a senior surveyor of the Department is proceeding as soon as humanly possible to Montevideo.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his statement. I am sure that I express the sympathy of all Members of the House with the relatives, and we can only hope that some life still exists within the burning hulk of this British vessel. One lives in hope for survivors.

I want to emphasise the dangers which are ever present to our seamen, and I hope the Government will be giving all necessary assistance—for example, air search facilities to hunt for survivors—and that hope will come out of this tragedy.

I also wish to bring to the Government's attention the mounting concern of maritime organisations in this country. Despite the absence of any complete information at present, it appears that once again this accident has all the hallmarks of a Liberian vessel involved with a British vessel, with tremendous tragedy for our seamen.

I welcome the statement that an inquiry will be made by the British authorities and that we shall be represented at the Argentine inquiry. Would the hon. Gentleman consider asking the Liberian authorities, in view of the circumstances of this tragedy, to hold their inquiry in this country, as they did in the case of the" Pacific Glory" incident, which again was outside our territorial waters but had great consequences for this country? I should like the hon. Gentleman to give serious consideration to this request because many people in the maritime world seriously suspect the impartiality of a Liberian inquiry.

The hon. Gentleman has raised three points. First, I would emphasise that every effort is being made to ensure that the search for survivors is being carried out. Our Vice-Consul in Montevideo is making an attempt to board the vessel at 4 o'clock Uruguayan time.

Secondly, on the safety side, the House will want to know that our requirements are fully up to the standards established by the Safety of Life at Sea Convention of the Inter-governmental Maritime Consultative Organisation, which I hope will put the hon. Member's mind at rest on that matter.

As for the hon. Gentleman's last point, I have no reason to believe that the Liberian authorities will not do everything possible to co-operate with us in an inquiry on this matter.

With permission, Mr. Speaker, I wish to make a statement.

Yesterday evening I made an application to the Industrial Court under Section 141(1) of the Industrial Relations Act for an order under which a ballot could be held to ascertain the views of all employees of the British Railways Board affected by the current dispute between the board and the three railway unions.

The purpose of my application was to provide the fullest opportunity for all employees to express their wishes about the acceptability of the board's offer, which was further improved yesterday, and about the re-imposition of industrial action.

I made my application when there was no positive response to the letter the board sent to the three unions expressing its willingness to consider any proposals the unions might wish to put forward for a settlement within the total cost of the board's last offer and to implement the new rates of pay from 5th June with the introduction of a minimum earnings level of £20·50 a week from 1st May.

The court sat at 8.30 p.m. and continued until just after midnight, when the President announced the court's intention to adjourn the hearing until 1.30 p.m. today.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. While my right hon. Friend's statement would be seem to be a statement of fact about events which have taken place, is not further discussion on this matter sub judice, the point being that it is important that the court has a real basis? To treat it differently from any other court may weaken the position which can develop in the future.

I think that that is a matter for me. This is a court. Certainly it is a court of law, and the sub judice rule must be applied in relation to it just as it is to any other court. However, it is for me to decide what is in order.

May I first ask the right hon. Gentleman why he dealt with the House in so discourteous and misleading a fashion yesterday afternoon? Is it not clear that the decision had been made and that arrangements had been set in train some hours before the right hon. Gentleman made his statement to the House? Is he aware that I have before me an extract from the Press Association tape which came out an hour before the right hon. Gentleman's statement yesterday and which says:

" Rail unions have learned unofficially Mr. Macmillan is making an application for a ballot" —

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is not this the very point that my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Sir Harmar Nicholls) raised with you just now, that what is being said, like what was said yesterday afternoon, can do nothing but harm to the negotiations and the legal process now being gone through? This sort of comment is disgraceful. It went on yesterday afternoon and is going on again today.

Order. This is not an easy matter. I hope that tempers on both sides of the House will remain fairly calm about it. In my view, what the Secretary of State said yesterday and the events leading up to the application clearly are matters about which lie can be questioned in the House. Any influence upon negotiations is not a matter of order for me. When we come to the next step the position will be different, but the right hon. Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice) has not asked anything so far which is out of order.

One understands the reluctance of hon. Members opposite to have the actions of their Government questioned. But I return to my questioning of the Secretary of State about the way in which he dealt with this matter yesterday. In his statement he made no reference to the fact that a decision had been made to take this matter to the court. When questioned on it, he was evasive. I was reminding the right hon. Gentleman about the reports on the tape. They were in the early editions of the evening papers before the right hon. Gentleman made his statement to the House. What is more, I understand that a message was received at the National Industrial Relations Court from the right hon. Gentleman's Department yesterday morning that it was to stand by. Why could not the right hon. Gentleman have been more frank with us yesterday?

I deal now with the right hon. Gentleman's statement today. I ask him to cease making this attempt to mislead the public about the state of negotiations. The words he used in his statement in referring to the board's offer was that it was" further improved yesterday". Yesterday the right hon. Gentleman made a statement in similar terms. Many of us pointed out that the further offer was merely a rejigging of the Jarratt award—

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker—

Sit down.

This is obviously a point which will have to be decided by the court. [Interruption.] This is a point which will be submitted from the management side.

Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. With great respect, are you aware that the majority of right hon. and hon. Members take the view that it is better for points of order to be left to the Chair and that a contrary view is by implication a reflection on the ability of the Chair to make these decisions—which we resent?

With regard to these points of order, again I ask the House to be calm. I have studied the relevant Section of the Act very carefully with regard to what the Minister has to do and with regard to what the court has to do. I shall try to guide the House accordingly.

My question arose directly out of the right hon. Gentleman's statement. I was about to ask him whether he did not recall that yesterday the accuracy of a similar statement was challenged by my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, North-East (Mr. Bradley) who, as president of the TSSA, has been involved in the negotiations and who pointed out to the right hon. Gentleman that the net cost of the latest rejigging of the Jarratt award was rather less than the original Jarratt offer. How can the right hon. Gentleman possibly refer to a further improvement on the offer? This is an attempt to mislead the public.

It would seem to serious students of industrial relations that the whole sequence of events this week and the right hon. Gentleman's conduct have caused the maximum confusion without doing anything to bring about a settlement. Why did the right hon. Gentleman do nothing during the cooling-off period? Why did he allow the cooling-off period to end on Monday without taking action? Why did he wait until Wednesday before meeting the unions and then do so without any constructive or substantial offer to make? Indeed, why did he sabotage that meeting in advance by his partisan language in this House? Why, then, did he wait until yesterday evening before going for a ballot, timing it in such a way that it was clearly too late for the work to rule to be called off? In other words, are we not witnessing a situation in which the Government are lurching from one irrelevant gimmick to another, instead of promoting a sensible compromise which could have settled this dispute at least three weeks ago?

Dealing with the right hon. Gentleman's first point, he said that there was an indication on the tape that the railway unions had learned unofficially that there was to be a ballot. Certainly they did not learn that from me or from my Department, because the decision had not been taken. It may be relevant to point out that at about the same time another evening newspaper also carried headlines saying that there was definitely not to be a ballot. There may have been some confusion, because a decision had not been taken. I took the decision that I announced yesterday after I had seen the letter from the board and after I became convinced that there was no response from the unions and after consulting formally the one registered union concerned, the Transport Salaried Staffs Association.

The right hon. Gentleman's second point alleging that there was no improvement is relevant to his first point. The original offer of a minimum earnings guarantee starting on 1st May came from me. It was important that the unions concerned should understand that it came from the board and that the board accepted and agreed to it. Until I was certain that the unions understood that and that it made no difference to their acceptance or rejection of the board's offer, I was not in a position to make any decision about going to court.

On the right hon. Gentleman's final point, there is no confusion that has been caused by me. There has been a good deal of confusion about the nature of the negotiations. During the cooling-off period the unions accused the board of not moving at all. The board might equally say to the unions that they have not moved, and it has said so. As I pointed out to the House, it is a new definition of negotiations which allows one side to move but allows the other side to remain firm.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is it not a fact that the court was asked to stand by from 12 noon yesterday?

That may be a relevant supplementary question, but it is not a point of order.

Will my right hon. Friend first accept that the great majority of thinking people will reject the partisan interpretation expressed by the right hon. Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice)—[Interruption.] I said" thinking people", who believe that my right hon. Friend is conducting his difficult task with patience and statesmanship. In view of the fact that working to rule constitutes

'' irregular industrial action short of a strike'…carried on by a group of workers with the intention of preventing, reducing or otherwise interfering with the production of goods or the provision of services"

under Section 33(4) of the Act, will my right hon. Friend say whether he is able to look into the rules operating in this industry and others to see whether they represent a sensible and practical position and are up to date in every respect? This is what puzzles many people in the country today.

Perhaps the House will allow me to fill in one gap which I inadvertently left out of the question put to me by the right hon. Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice). I was asked about the court standing by. The court has been standing by for some time. It is only right to be prudent. The only question I recollect about which the court had been informed by my Department was that the decision had not yet been taken not to go for a ballot. That was a correct statement. I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for the first part of his supplementary question. On the second part concerning matters of detail in this dispute, those are precisely what my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General is seeking to establish in the court later today. This is a matter for the court.

Concerning the general question of the rule book, any set of rules concerned with the operation of almost any organisation can be interpreted so as to make that operation less efficient. It is not necessary to give illustrations to hon. Members. All hon. Members seek to obey the rules of order, Mr. Speaker, but there are methods by which the rules of order can be interpreted to suit the individual needs of hon. Members and sometimes to delay the proceedings of this House.

Without reference to the merits of the application, I should like to ask the right hon. Gentleman a general question relating to ballots. Who does he envisage will draft the questions? Who will handle the count? Is it intended that when ballot papers are sent out, conflicting statements of view will be contained in the envelope?

Order. I think the right hon. Gentleman is going too far. The conditions of the ballot and its organisation are matters for the court, should it decide to make an order. I should prefer that question not to be pursued.

I bow to your ruling, Mr. Speaker. It may be that although the law has discretion, the Minister also-has discretion under the Act. I was seeking not to explore the area which is clearly within the confines of the court but to ask the Minister what discretion he felt he had and how he intended to exercise it.

We are on new ground. Section 142 makes it clear that the order of the court must specify, among other things, the question on which the ballot is to be taken. Therefore, I must direct that the Minister does not answer that question.

On a point of order. Further to the point made by the Leader of the Liberal Party—

Order. If the hon Gentleman wishes to ask a supplementary question, I will call him in due course.

I am on a point of order, Mr. Speaker. There are tremendously wide implications in what you have just said about not discussing Section 142. It may be that as part of this procedure the whole question of the formulation of ballot papers will go to the commission. This will affect the engineering industry acutely. We would want to discuss in this House some of the questions which may arise. Therefore, I hope you are not making a binding ruling that we cannot discuss matters of this kind which may be before the court as there are a number of issues coming up which we shall undoubtedly want to discuss.

No. Although I am prepared to reconsider my view and perhaps rule differently on a later occasion, I am quite clear in my mind that the possible order of the court cannot be discussed at this stage. When the order has been made perhaps we can discuss the way that the question has been put. However, whilst the court is considering whether to grant the application it has many statutory provisions to meet which have to be specified in the order. That must be a matter of argument. The court is the place to argue out those points. It is for the representatives of the unions and of the Government to put their different points of view. This House is not the place to discuss that matter at this stage. However, there may come a time when it is right for us to have a debate on the way that the question has been framed.

As one who has in his constituency one of the largest marshalling yards in the country and two very important junctions, may I ask my right hon. Friend, first, to accept that his conduct of affairs, so far as they came within his duty, is beyond praise and compares very favourably with the highly inflammatory statement made by the right hon. Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice)?

Secondly, without in any way infringing anything which might be sub judice, will my right hon. Friend do his best to persuade the board, perhaps through his right hon. Friend the Minister for Transport Industries, to inform the public very fully of the real emoluments of railwaymen today and what they will be under all the permutations which have been presented by the board? In particular will he ask the board to try to evaluate, if possible, the value to a railwayman of concessionary fares and free travel to which he may be entitled?

I thank my hon. Friend for the first part of his supplementary question. I will certainly suggest, through my right hon. Friend the Minister for Transport Industries, that the board should inform the public as well as all concerned as fully as possible about the present levels of wages and what the claim put forward by the unions and the board's proposals would mean. It is right and proper that this kind of explanation should be made to the public generally as explicitly as possible.

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that it is beyond my comprehension why he went to the court so late in the evening without even briefing the defence about the case which he, through the Solicitor-General, wished to put to the court? Why was it that counsel had to state to the president of the court that he might have to ask for an adjournment at that stage because he had no information about the details of the application? When will the right hon. Gentleman try to act as a true conciliator instead of making controversial statements backed by his hon. Friends? When will he commence conciliating, trying to bring both sides together and encouraging a settlement which will relieve the anxiety and suffering of the people of the country?

I applied to the court as soon as I had taken a decision and consulted the registered union concerned and informed myself about the reaction of the three unions to the board's last letter. I have no control or influence over when the court may choose to sit. Indeed I should not seek to make any suggestion to the court on that matter. I hope the House will generally accept that I did everything I could from the moment I first came into the dispute to try to bring the parties together. However, it was made plain to me, certainly by the end of the time, that from the moment I came into the dispute—I suggest I could not have done anything before—there was no possibility of the unions accepting anything other than substantially what they had originally asked for. I make no complaint about that. I am merely stating it as a position which the unions are entitled to adopt. In those circumstances, it was my duty under the Industrial Relations Act to ensure that industrial action—the unions have an absolute right to take industrial action; I am not disputing that—was not taken until every possibility had been explored. This I did to the best of my ability.

In view of the anxieties expressed by some hon. Gentlemen opposite about the sub judice rule on which you, Mr. Speaker, have given a ruling, may I ask the right hon. Gentleman to consider this point and give advice to his right hon. Friends? Has not his task been made more difficult by the repeated habit of Ministers to deal with this matter in a highly political way on political occasions? Is he aware that before he became Secretary of State, at a very critical stage in the coal dispute the Prime Minister used the occasion of the Liverpool Conservative meeting to make an appeal to the miners instead of meeting them? Does he recall that at a critical moment when the miners were considering arbitration the issue was again fouled up by a statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the Conservative Political Centre? We now read in the Press that there is to be a hard-hitting political speech on a political occasion in Scotland tomorrow. Would it not make the Secretary of State's task and the discharge of his stewardship to this House easier if these matters were handled, as I believe he is trying to handle them, whatever our criticisms of him or of the Act, in a ministerial sense without trying to make political capital out of them at political meetings?

I must respectfully remind the right hon. Gentleman that it has been made plain to me by many statements in the Press and elsewhere that part of the reason for this difficulty is that previous settlements have led to a hardening of attitude on the part of these unions. In other words, a political element was introduced into this situation long before I got there, and not by this side of the House or by the Government.

I think I must also say that I cannot blame any of my right hon. and hon. Friends, whom I have fully supported, for making it plain to the country what tactics have been used. In some cases it has been said openly by members of the union that it would be cheaper for the board and for the country to accede in full to the demands rather than to try to bring them down and get them near the board's level.

Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that the unions' motivation is political and not a genuine industrial dispute in which they are trying to get the best for their members? Whether or not he agrees with what they are asking for, is he saying that their motivation is political?

I am saying that it was made clear that on the one hand, as was said to me, the board had no right to take any outside considerations into account and that this was a purely industrial dispute, but that the unions on the other hand were taking outside and previous settlements into account. I am not accusing them of making a party political issue of this, but this is a political thing because the board is vulnerable. This is a nationalised industry, and the unions were willing to exert maximum pressure because of their capacity to inflict disturbance on the country. If that is not a political attitude. I do not know what is.

rose—

Order. This is getting very like a general debate. I shall allow one more question from each side, because I want to protect Private Member's time.

A careful reading of yesterday's OFFICIAL REPORT shows that the statement this morning by the right hon. Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice) does not hold water and was obviously made for party political reasons. Has my right hon. Friend approached the unions to ask them whether they will call off the work-to-rule until a decision has been made by the court, in order to avoid anxiety and discomfort to the travelling public?

I thank my hon. Friend for the first part of his question. I have not approached the unions about calling off the work-to-rule because in my judgment and I may have been wrong—this is a matter for the court once the application has been made to it.

Is the Minister still unaware that the move which he alleges the board made during the cooling-off period involved the presentation of a package which amounted in value to £400,000 less than the value of the Jarratt award, and that when the board was challenged about the accuracy of that it did not deny it?

Secondly, will the right hon. Gentleman confirm or deny that yesterday, many hours before he came to the House and declared that he still had on open mind on the question, the C.I.R. spent a long time preparing two expensive films for television and advertisements for the Press on the subject of a ballot? From where did the C.I.R. gets its instructions?

Any contingency planning made by the C.I.R., which is an independent organisation, is not my direct responsibility. As to a variation of the Jarratt offer, the hon. Gentleman knows that at all stages of the negotiations during the cooling-off period the board made it plain to the three unions concerned that it was willing to give the full amount of 12½ per cent, of the wages and salaries bill in any form that would suit them. That has been open to the unions, and I understand that it has been repeated by the board.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. The point I want to raise is one which I think you preferred should not be raised when there were earlier points of order because the Chair wanted to get on with questions on the matter at issue. Are you aware that the House must and willingly does accept your ruling today, and also your ruling of a few days ago—unfortunately it was not mentioned by those who raised points of order today—that in this difficult situation, pending the report of the Select Committee on Procedure, you intended to rule as leniently or as liberally as possible—I am not sure which phrase you used; perhaps I have got it wrong, and if I have you will correct it—because of the rights of the House in this matter. The House has decided to refer the matter to the Select Committee on Procedure, but week is succeeding week.

We know that those on the Committee have a difficult task to do, but it is clear that the House is being put into greater difficulty all the time.

Is not the position that the reason why we have a sub judice rule is that we are ourselves a High Court—we are the High Court of Parliament, as against a High Court of Justice—and there should not be a clash between the two courts? But some of us are becoming increasingly disturbed, and we may have to raise this matter before the Select Committee on Procedure reports, perhaps by debate, though obviously not while the matter is before the court or the dispute remains unsettled, and obviously not while the court is possessed of other important tasks.

We are concerned about the fact that the High Court of Parliament is liable, not by your rulings, Mr. Speaker, but by what the House has done, to be improperly prevented from discussing the background to disputes on the ground that they have been referred to a court of law. It seems to be a fact that the Press, the BBC and Independent Television are being gagged beyond what is reasonable, and this House cannot allow itself to be gagged.

Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. When ruling on that point of order, will the Chair take into account the fact that the sub judice rule as it stands has passed the test of time as being both fair and proper and that to twist it to fit into what appear to be political industrial differences of view is not to pay a service to the law of England which has proved itself to be above suspicion so far?

I realise that strong feelings are held on this matter. With regard to my having expressed the view that I should take a liberal approach to the matter, I said that I was not insensitive to the point that if there were to be a protracted dispute before the court, that might prevent Parliament from expressing a view on it at any time. I thought that it might not be in the public interest that that should be the position. I think that it was the right hon. and learned Member for West Ham, South (Sir Elwyn Jones) who said that I had made a liberal interpretation and I said that he must put his own construction on my words.

I do not want to argue the matter now, but I assure the House that I am very much aware of the difficulties. There are occasions when the rights of the House, as the High Court of Parliament, must supersede those of the court. One can consider circumstances where there are emergency regulations before the House in a situation in which the House has decided to take certain action and there are proceedings before a court.

I think it is better not to pursue the matter further today, but I assure the House that I am aware of both sides of the argument. This particular matter is now before a court of law and the sub judice rule must be applied. Today I was fairly rigid about the nature of the ballot and the question to be put. Those are matters before the court today.

As you gave the correct phrase, Mr. Speaker, and I gave the incorrect one, obviously the House will note and accept it, but it is right to say that on this whole issue the House understands the extreme difficulties that you are facing and will back your rulings in this difficult situation.

This is difficult and it is new, and past procedures provide little guidance. The sooner the House as a whole decides what are its rights in this matter the easier it will be for you and the House.

I entirely agree.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. May I seek your guidance on an important matter? I understand that Mr. Justice Phillimore's Committee is looking at the question of contempt of court as it applies to the Industrial Relations Court, but I am informed that there is no likelihood of getting its report within the next 12 months. In view of what you have said and the fact that the Attorney-General is reluctant to make any comment on possible amendments to the law of contempt, and in view also of the fact that the Phillimore Committee is considering the matter, could you advise the House on how we can accelerate the business of either getting a report from the Phillimore Committee so that we can debate the law of contempt or asking the Attorney-General to come to the House and make a statement about the law of contempt as it applies to the Industrial Relations Court?

I will certainly consider the matter which the hon. Gentleman has raised and see whether I can in any way assist him or the House.

I beg to move,

That this House draws attention to the value of pre-school education; and believes that resources must be made available for the increased provision of nursery school places.

I suggest that it would be convenient for the House to discuss at the same time the following Motion which stands in the name of the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison): namely,

That this House calls for a steady expansion of pre-school provision.

I move my Motion with high hopes that the sheer modesty of its terms will commend it to the House. I am even more hopeful when I see that the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison), who by his fortune in the Ballot won the right to put a second Motion on the Notice Paper, has chosen the same subject and has framed his Motion in similar terms to my own.

We are grateful that the right hon. Lady the Secretary of State for Education and Science is here to listen to the debate, and I hope that that, too, is an omen that she intends to accept the terms of the Motion.

Man has roamed the earth as a two-legged creature endowed with intellect since the first Ice Age some 600,000 years ago. Each and every one of us owes his earthly existence to countless ancestors who have gone before. We are each a link in a very long chain, and if we are suffering from the mistakes and afflictions of our forefathers, we are also heirs to the knowledge and discernment which they have passed on over the centuries.

However, we must learn how best to benefit from all the knowledge, wisdom and experience which has been handed clown to us, and we tend to think of our schools as places in which that can be done. In other words, our schools are in a way symbols of man's progress in the past. But they are much more than that. They epitomise our faith in the future, for in our schools, as in schools in other parts of the world, the future is being prepared.

It is not when he goes to school that the child of five begins his education. As the Plowden Report said in 1966:

" Long before a child is five he is already using words and is often familiar with books, toys and music. The issue is not whether he should be ' educated' before he reaches school age because that is happening anyway. What has to be decided is whether his education is to take place in increasing association with other children and under the supervision of skilled people, as well as of parents, in the right conditions and with the right equipment."

Thus, education begins at birth, and those who have closely studied child development claim that the maximum rate of post-natal growth and development of the brain takes place during the years up to five.

However much we may boast of our education system—and there are many parts of it of which we can be rightly proud—there is still an enormous waste of the talents of our children, and perhaps it is in the lack of educational facilities for the under-fives in this period of enormous importance, in the formative years up to the age of five, that we are being most neglectful of the wonderful promise of the future which is represented in our children.

Wordsworth said that the child is father to the man. I believe that the child aged three to five is very much father to the older child as well as to the man, for what happens to him during those earlier years largely determines how well or how badly equipped he is to face the rest of his life.

At birth we are" trailing clouds of glory," to use Wordsworth's words, and the growing child is" by the vision splendid on his way attended." Then the" visionary gleam" slowly fades from his consciousness as he becomes more cabined and confined by the" shades of the prison house" of life increasingly closing around him. Those who have children know exactly what Wordsworth meant.

To watch a small child's personality blossoming out is a truly wonderful experience, and particularly so from the age of three to five. Never again after that age is it quite so wonderful, for the child's capacity for questioning, imagining and inventiveness is not matched at any other age.

A child of three needs the love of parents, but he has reached the stage when he becomes more and more independent in play, and it is in play that he learns so much. No matter how close we are to a child; no matter how successful we are in our relation with him, he needs other children to share his world of fantasy in a way that his parents cannot. He also needs the kind of stimulus that a good nursery school can give.

The Plowden Report quotes Susan Isaacs, a pioneer in the study of the needs of young children, as follows:

" The nursery school is not a substitute for a good home: its prime function… is to supplement the normal services which the home renders to its children and to make a link between the natural and indispensable fostering of the child in the home and social life of the world at large."

We therefore need much greater provision for pre-school education if our children are to learn to live—because that is what education is all about—to retain Wordsworth's "visionary gleam" and to use wisely the leisure which is increasing in this age of leisure.

We shall not have the scientists and technicians we need, nor be able to make the best use of our expensive educational provision which is there for our older children and young men and women, unless we make sure that in every locality the under-fives have the best facilities to enable them to blossom out to their full potential in life.

A school is, of course, a very precious institution in any community. It is not a kind of factory in which children are pumped full of knowledge and information in the impersonal way in which we feed information and statistics into a computer. Nor is school the private domain of teachers where parents may not come. Each child is an individual for whom perhaps the two most important places are home and school, and there must be a strong link between those two places. That link is usually a strong one between a nursery school and the homes of its pupils, and for that reason also nursery schools provide an excellent preparation for the more formal education which comes after the age of five.

The agitation for nursery education has been going on for a long time and it might help if I were to remind the House of something of its history. The Nursery School Association was formed 50 years ago, and an organisation with similar aims, the Campaign for Nursery Education, is 12 years old.

The Education Act, 1944, gave nursery schools the blessing of Parliament, but no expansion of nursery facilities took place, and Circular 8/60 issued by the then Ministry of Education prohibited local education authorities from expanding their pre-school education. Some minor relaxation of Circular 8/60 has taken place, but in 1966 the Plowden Report pointed out that the under-fives were the only age group for whom no extra educational provision of any kind had been made since 1944. It said that nursery education on a large scale remained an unfulfilled promise. It is still an unfulfilled promise six years after the presentation of that report and 28 years after the passing of the 1944 Education Act.

Plowden recommended six years ago that there should be a large expansion of nursery education and that a start should be made as soon as possible; that preschool education should be available for children at any time after the beginning of the school year in which they reached the age of three, on a morning or afternoon sessional basis, and that over the country as a whole at least 15 per cent. of the children from three to five years of age should have full-time nursery education.

So here was a high-powered body, the Central Advisory Council for Education, looking at the case for nursery education and conceding it completely. It remained for the Government to find the means of implementing the council's proposals, but, as we all know, no Government have ever accepted that primary education must include nursery education.

It is true that the urban aid programme introduced by the Labour Government and continued by the present Government brought aid of various kinds, and not only educational aid, to areas of social deprivation, and a main place in the programme has been given to the provision of nursery schools and nursery classes. Since deprivation at an early stage in life can be the most damaging, and since nursery education can help to make up for the limitations of the home and of local environment, the expansion of nursery education has been concentrated in areas where it is most needed, but, while I agree that deprived areas should be given priority of treatment in the provision of nursery places, I feel that the time has come when we must start the process of implementing the Plowden recommendations to provide nursery education for all our children.

As I have said, if we are to implement the Plowden recommendations the Government and Parliament must will the means. I know that it can always be said that there is shortage of accommodation, and shortage of teachers, but that is only another way of saying that under the present system of priorities in education the means of expanding our nursery education are not being willed. Almost all local authorities are, I understand, keen and anxious to start providing preschool facilities, but even those which have the resources and the building staff to do so are prevented from going ahead by the notorious Circular 8/60.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short) had this to say recently

"The distribution of wealth in our society is reflected by the distribution of resources in our education system. Seventy-five per cent. of the nation's wealth is owned by 5 per cent. of the population and in the education system a small number of the most able young people have a quite disproportionate share of education resources devoted to them to the detriment of the vast majority; for example, three quarters of the working population have no further contact with the education system after the age of 18, but 6 per cent. of 15 year olds have £4,000 each devoted to their education after this age—excluding capital costs.

This is partly because a class society needs this kind of imbalance in education expenditure to maintain it, but it is also because of the profound connection between social class and educational achievement. The working class child's educational chances have not improved relatively in 30 years."

I am sure that my right hon. Friend is right. Our intelligence is born in us: it is not acquired. It is, one might say, our genetic endowment. The use we make of that innate intelligence, that genetic endowment, is mostly decided by the kind of education we receive. The not-so-gifted child needs to be helped in order to ensure that the gifts that he has are not wasted either for himself or for the community. The better-off sections of the community can buy the kind of educational assistance which is needed for their duller children as well as for their brighter children, and it is wrong that money can buy for private use scarce educational resources to the detriment of the children of the less-well-off parents.

What, then, do I ask the right hon. Lady the Secretary of State for Education and Science to do? It is perhaps too much to expect her to stop from doing so those who are buying up those scarce educational resources for their children, but surely she can do something about nursery education. Ideally she should campaign with her colleagues in the Cabinet to ensure that the money to implement the Plowden recommendations in full is made available. The very least she can do is to withdraw that infamous Circular 8/60 so that those local authorities which wish to do so and are in a position to do so may expand their nursery school provisions.

What is the gap between current expenditure on pre-school education and the need? Out of a total education budget of £2,895 million less than 2 per cent. goes to pre-school education. Only one in 10 of two and a half million children aged between three and five receive any nursery education at all, and to reach that figure of one in ten one needs to include the classes started under the urban aid programme, the private nursery classes started as a result of parental pressure in middle-class areas, and the" rising fives" who are able to get into infant schools before reaching their fifth birthday.

I do not know the cost of implementing the Plowden recommendations in full —I have no doubt that it is a very large sum—but the minimum aim of the Campaign for Nursery Education is an extra £50 million over the next five years. That is a very modest amount, a mere bagatelle, when one looks at all the large sums of money, the scores of millions of pounds, the present Government have given to the better off.

I had originally intended at this point to speak of the ways in which money has been given to the better off as incentives for them to invest in industry and to answer all our problems. Those people have been on strike. They have swallowed up all the largesse which the present Government have handed out to them, but they have refused to demonstrate their confidence in the Government by investing in industry. I shall not go further along those lines because I do not want to disturb what may be a two-party approach to this subject, but how much better for Britain it would have been, how much better for our future, if all that money conceded to the better-off in the October, 1970, mini-Budget and in last year's Budget had been spent on nursery education.

Hon. Members may not agree with my remarks about the Budget of last year, but I end as I began by saying that I hope that my Motion, modest as it is, will commend itself to the House.

The House will recollect that Mr. Speaker asked whether hon. Members wish to take the two Motions to-gather. As no hon. Member demurred, they are being taken together, and I now call the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison), who put forward the second Motion.

I will certainly not demur, Mr. Deputy Speaker, either from the notion that the two Motions should be taken together or from the proposition by the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Whitlock) that we may approach this subject on a bi-partisan basis. I was tempted when he denounced the infamous Circular 8/60 to ask him whether it was an infamous circular during the years the Labour Party was in power, or became infamous merely when we came back into power. However, I will not pursue that, because I genuinely think that this is a topic on which we are likely to have a good deal of agreement between the two sides of the House.

I count myself rather fortunate in that in effect the second Motion is to be debated first. Whether by coincidence or otherwise, it is a good thing that the House should have a chance to devote some hours to this topic.

I do not propose to describe in great detail the case for more pre-school provision. I have a shrewd suspicion that if I were to do so now I should be preaching entirely to the converted, for I do not think that any dissentients are present, and I do not think that there is any need at this stage to try to persuade people of the advantages of preschool provision, for it has become widely accepted.

However, it is a mistake to misstate the case. There is a risk in putting forward arguments which may be overthrown. For example, it is important to stress that pre-school provision is not desirable for all children. There are undoubtedly some children who simply are not ready for pre-school provision. The Plowden Report acknowledged that, and anybody who has had any dealings with this age group will recognise that some children are simply not ready for it or might have home circumstances that render it unnecessary.

Secondly, it is imprudent to say too much about the long-term consequences of pre-school provision. It is tempting to say that if children are able to go to nursery schools between the ages of 3 and 5, that will give them a continuous advantage in their education thereafter. Educational research is a rather unpredictable affair and it has a horrid way of undermining the assumptions of the progressive point of view.

As the Plowden Report reminded us, Dr. Douglas and Miss Ross found in their researches into the cohort of children that they followed through their lives that, in fact, the educational performance of children from nursery schools was, as would be expected, better at the age of 8, but the advantage had disappeared by 11 and children who had been to nursery schools were doing slightly worse than other children by the age of 15. I do not think that one should attach any great importance, particularly to the last of those research findings, but it is worth making the point that we do not need to prove a kind of long-term case, showing that there are long-term advantages to be derived from nursery or other pre-school education, to justify providing it on a large scale.

It is generally true that the research done in various forms of compensatory education, as it is called, particularly in the United States, has so far tended to show in terms of measurable results that the children concerned have not received the kind of pay-off that had been hoped for. Nevertheless, there is a strong case for pre-school provision, and it stands in several parts.

First, whatever the researchers may tell us, I am sure that in the deprived areas, and particularly in the immigrant areas where there are large numbers of children who may not be familiar with the language, nursery education, or some variant, is essential. We have been absolutely right since the Plowden Report to make this a clear priority. Children who may have difficult social backgrounds in some cases and will certainly have cultural handicaps to overcome would normally only benefit from having nursery provision available for them.

Secondly it is also true that the majority of ordinary children, if I may term them in that way, also derive a great deal of benefit from pre-scool provision. I have seen it in my own children. I make the point that one did not benefit and so we took her away. But the others have clearly gained, and they have gained in ways which people can see fairly easily. They gain the ability to get on with their fellow children. They gain in the ability to respond to the kind of collective environment or the rush and bustle that inevitably go with education. They gain in the first steps they take in handling materials, sand and water and other familiar features of this stage, and they gain in the first glimpse of the process of what I suppose one would call semi-formal play.

Thirdly, the mothers benefit from their children being able to go away for part of the day to a nursery school or playgroup, or whatever it may be. We all recognise that the strain on a mother can be pressing. While motherhood is for most people normally a great pleasure, continuous motherhood all round the clock for seven days a week is hard work, and it does nothing but good for mothers to be able to turn their attention to something else.

They may choose to go out to work, and that is plainly perfectly legitimate. They may choose to go and have their hair done, and that is equally legitimate. I should not object—how could I before so many distinguished hon. Ladies?—to any woman wanting to spend that time however she would. I simply make the point that this is one of the benefits of pre-school provision.

Essentially what we have to say is that this period of 3 to 5 is a period when some kind of pre-educational activity is desirable both for the longer-term effect on the child and the benefit to the family and it is also reasonable to recognise that it is a good thing in itself. One can get too obsessed with what comes after each of the stages of education. The same could be applied to the primary stage and perhaps even to the secondary stage. One can become too obsessed with the notion that education is preparation for the next thing which comes along the line.

Of course, the next thing which comes along the line is very important, but it is worth pointing out that two years out of the three score years and ten, or whatever it is, that we have to live is a substantial period, and anything that may be done to make those two years pleasant and enjoyable and attractive in their own right is well worth supporting. The case for pre-school provision is very strong.

The question now is: in what form should it be provided? There is a point of view which says that it should be the pure milk or nothing and that the fully fledged, properly equipped, purpose-built nursery school or nursery class with a fully trained staff is the only acceptable way of going about it. There are people in my constituency who are deeply involved in nursery education who hold this view strongly. They say that it should be all or nothing. They would rather not have what they would regard as inferior forms of pre-school provision. They think that the answer is to give every child an opportunity of going to a fully fledged nursery school. In nursery education circles there is a certain suspicion of what they regard as excessive amateurism in things like the playgroup movement.

This is delicate ground. I have sympathy for the professionals in their approach. I understand why they feel as they do, and I also understand why they think that they must go for the highest standards and not compromise on anything in between. In taking this line they are taking a completely sincere and dedicated attitude to their profession, and I do not want to argue in detail against them. I do not, for instance, want to say, to take one of the accusations made against true nursery schools, that they exclude parents. I have just been sent by the headmistress of Beech Green nursery school in my town of Aylesbury a list of parental activities and forms of involvement in this nursery school which is most impressive. I will not read it out because it would take a long time, but it establishes very clearly that a nursery school is capable of involving parents and is by no means one of those institutions where the doors are closed and notices are put up saying" Parents keep out."

I also believe that there are other forms of pre-school provision which have a great deal to offer. I see why some think it should be nursery schools or nothing, but I am sure that experience over these last years in the provision of playgroups shows that the playgroup can be a very worth while activity and can create a good spirit in the community in which it operates. It certainly can involve parents. It would be fair to say that one of the effects of the playgroup movement has been to stress this sort of parental involvement which was so much a feature of the Plowden Report.

I do not think that playgroups are a poor second best. Obviously they are liable to be very varied in their standards, and how could that be otherwise? They have about them to my mind certain strong attractions. Parental involvement is one. They also show at their best a kind of imaginative improvisation which I cannot but believe is very good for parents, the people running the playgroups and the children. The fact that a playgroup may take place in a slightly drab church hall does not seem to be an overwhelming objection to it. It helps to teach people or to give people the opportunity to realise that things can be done with a slightly drab church hall which can bring it alive. One of the points we have learned about education over the last 10 or 20 years is that this kind of improvisation, this turning of the drab into the exciting and stimulating, is one of the most valuable and worth while activities.

The educational or quasi-educational role of the nursery school can to some extent be found in the playgroup. I know that this is where the argument becomes very difficult, possibly, and I do not think it is realistic to imagine that the normal playgroup can fully compete in this respect with the normal nursery school. But the playgroup can help the child in his early stages in the educational system. Equally, I think they should be given more help in doing so. I believe that the supervision of the playgroup activity should be transferred to the Department of Education and Science.

As the House knows, it was originally within the province of the Ministry of Health. After Seebohm it was moved to the local authority social services department. I would have thought that the educational content in the playgroup movement was capable of being dealt with by the DES and that at the very least its services and advice should be made much more widely available to playgroups than is the case. They are made available in some local authorities, but very much more could be done if there were a formal recognition that a playgroup is capable of performing an educational role rather than being simply a way of looking after children for a certain period of the day. I hope that my right hon. Friend and her colleagues will be able to shift the balance of responsibility a little.

We agree that pre-school education is a good thing; the question is: how do we get more of it? We have been arguing about these merits long before the Plowden Report and perhaps with redoubled vigour since it was published at the beginning of 1967. The hon. Member for Nottingham, North told us a little about the proportion of the pre-school population who are receiving nursery education and came up with a figure of one in ten. I would not necessarily quarrel with his facts, but it may be worth elaborating them to show that the proportion of children getting some form of pre-school provision is very much greater than that.

In 1971 the total population of 3- to 4-year-olds was 1,665,000. Among these, under-5s in school totalled 324,781, of whom 150,000 or so were the rising-5s, in other words, children in primary school who had been taken early. Playgroups and day nurseries accounted for 299,011, residential nurseries for 2,500. About 625,000 out of this 1,665,000 were receiving some form, of pre-school provision. I see a certain amount of nodding and shaking of heads. I believe that I have got the figures correct, but if they are shown to be wrong I will withdraw them.

Even if a fairly substantial number of children are getting some kind of pre-school provision we would like to see a much higher proportion achieved as soon as possible. It seems to be quite inadequate that a town like Aylesbury should have only one nursery school. I am sure that this pattern can be repeated in many parts of the country.

How do we get more? Do we do it by the perfectionists' answer of saying that there should be full provision, full implementation of the 1944 Act, the Plowden Report ideals and so on? I hope that this will come about within the next few years, and we should clearly retain and establish this as our objective. There is a lot of argument about the cost of it, but it looks as if it is somewhere in the rather broad range between £60 million and £100 million.

Mr. Howard Glennerster has done some interesting work in a recent pamphlet about the possible costs of implementing Plowden today and over the next few years, which shows that is the kind of band in which we should be looking for the answer. I do not think it is on as of now to say that we shall get the whole lot. Equally, I do not think it would be right to fall into the trap of what might be called sterile perfectionism. It would be a great mistake to say that because we cannot have the whole lot straight away we will not have anything at all.

The hon. Gentleman keeps repeating, as though it were a fact and history, that there are people who are arguing for what he calls sterile perfectionism, who want all or nothing. Would he care to cite his sources and let us know who these people are, because I have never met anyone like that?

I have talked to people in my constituency—

Oh, well!

The hon. Lady shakes her head and dismisses them. I am simply saying I have talked to people who believe that we should aim for the whole lot. I understand their point of view. What I am trying to argue is that I do not think we should accept it completely, and what I am going on to talk about is what we do then.

There are a number of positive things that we can do within the framework of determined gradualism. We should continue the policy of pressing for the social and educational improvements put forward by Plowden, which Governments have been implementing. What has been done so far is good, but we need more. Whatever our view about the desirability of pre-school provision, we must still say that this is the area where most has to be done at once.

I hope that before long Circular 8/60 will be withdrawn. The reasons for it being issued were understandable, as were the reasons why the Labour Government persisted with it. I want to see it withdrawn, and, in particular, I want to see local authorities put in a position where they can provide nursery schools if they so wish. I would like this to be a matter for local authority decision. Perhaps they will have to provide it out of their own rate money in the short term. If local authorities say" This is something which we believe our electorate will support", they should have every right to put their beliefs into practice.

Next, and most controversially, local authorities should, in the short term anyway, be able to charge fees to those people who can afford nursery provision. There was a note of reservation in the Plowden Report from a group of members of the council, including myself, who argued that, since we were not making anything like adequate headway in the provision of pre-school places, we should be prepared to introduce fees. I shall not go through the argument in detail it was essentially a matter of saying," Let us get on with it rather than straining after an ideal which perhaps cannot be fulfilled."

The people who signed that note were far from being a group of crusted reactionaries. Hon. Members may think that I am a crusted reactionary, but among the people were Professor David Donnison, Dr. Michael Young, Professor A. J. Ayer, all well-known Socialists, Ian Byatt, an academic, also a member of the Labour Party, I believe, and Lady Plowden, who is a middle-of-the-road person. So it was not a right-wing plot.

It would not be right for the Secretary of State at this stage to impose education with fee-paying. That is not a policy which I would favour. Attitudes towards questions like fee-paying vary greatly. I have the sneaking suspicion that fee-paying would be quite abhorrent in Wales. There is a strange cultural difference of approach among the Welsh compared with that in many parts of England. I do not think the Welsh would want fee-paying schools.

We should leave this decision in the hands of local authorities. They can sense the feeling in their areas about whether fees would be acceptable, and they could decide whether to provide nursery education with the aid of fees or without them and simply on the basis of what the ratepayer contributed. I shall not try to establish in detail the sort of figures which would be necessary. The Plowden Report talked in terms of 5s. for half a day. That was five years ago and presumably today, if the amount was to cover the cost, which was the recommendation of the Plowden Minority Report, it would have to be larger than that. This is a point of detail which could be argued later. I simply argue the case for the principle.

I also argue the case for greater collaboration between the private and public sectors. There was a very interesting article in the November, 1971, Newsletter of the National Campaign for Nursery Education about an experiment in Hemel Hempstead run by the George Street Nursery Association in collaboration with the local education authority. The basis of it was a proposal that a private nursery school should be built in the grounds of a primary school. A nursery association was formed to sponsor the nursery school. It was to be fee-paying, but the association was very keen that places should be provided to any children recommended by doctors or health visitors provided that the health authorities would pay the fees, and, in addition, it would offer 10 free places, which would require fund raising, for the children of other people in need.

I have only just heard about that experiment. I do not know how it has worked out. However, we should be seeing more of this type of experiment throughout the country. It is fatal for us to get into a rigid pattern. We need more variety.

Under the scheme, fees would not be charged to people who could not afford them. Fee-paying should not be an obstacle to the proper provision of nursery places in areas where the need is great

. We should go still further in backing playgroups. I have mentioned what seems to me the principal instrument by which this can be done; namely, the transfer of responsibility to the Department of Education and Science. It is important that more funds and, in particular, more advice should be made available. It is right to encourage factories, businesses and firms to provide some sort of nursery class or playgroup activity for the children of their employees. This may still be forced on firms in some areas. I know that with high unemployment this may seem to be a bit far-fetched, but the figures show that there are many areas, certainly in my constituency, where there is a shortage of women labour. It is very hard to find women workers. From the sheer self-interest point of view, firms should go out of their way to see whether they can take part in the provision of effective and properly conducted preschool activities.

Another point about which I hope my right hon. Friend and her colleagues will be tougher is in making sure that when people are planning new buildings, be they primary schools or housing estates, provision is made for nursery classes, which may not be possible at the moment but will be possible in a few years. The practice of local authorities varies in this matter. Some authorities, when planning primary sites, regularly say" We shall not be able to build a nursery class here, but we will leave space for it." This practice should be universal.

It is absolutely nonsensical that housing estates should still be planned, as I believe to be the case, without proper consideration of whether there will be room for nursery classes. As a result of local government reorganisation, one point which will have to be watched closely is ensuring that there is effective collaboration between housing authorities, which will be on one tier, and education authorities, which will be on another tier, in bringing this about.

We must also consider the other sectors of education to see whether there is any possibility of saving money so that more money may be available for the pre-school end of the scale. This is delicate ground, but a number of people feel that we are a bit lavish in expenditure on higher education. The hon. Lady the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short) said in a newspaper article the other day that we were lavish in our provision for, say, students. There might be money to be saved in this respect which could be spent on younger children. I am sure that the Department is considering this point carefully.

There is the equally delicate question of whether it is possible to hold down the relative cost of nursery provision. The cost of a nursery place, at just over £200 a year, is greater than the cost of a primary or secondary place. A nursery place is occupied by two children—one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. Therefore, the figure of just over £200 for a nursery place as against £186 for a secondary or primary place can be misleading.

Nevertheless, providing nursery education is very expensive because, in addition to the current cost, there will be a substantial capital cost if we are to build the nursery schools and classes we need. I do not say that I can give the answer. I have not the expertise to say how the cost of nursery provision could be held down. The question of the balance between fully qualified teachers and other forms of assistance is part of it. Perhaps there are other ways of dealing with the problem. I hope that my right hon. Friend and the Department are looking carefully at this matter.

Those are, to my mind, possibilities which we must consider. We have to be realistic. What I am looking for, and what I hope my right hon. Friend will be able to give, is clear and strong evidence that we shall push ahead on this front much faster than we have been able to do in the post-war years.

The whole House will want to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Whitlock) who has made this debate possible. Having listened to the speech by the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison) I think I am not with him in his views on amateurs looking after youngsters in nursery schools. Wherever possible one should have trained teachers. However, I very much agree with his view that the activities of the playgroup people should come under local education authorities.

It is an interesting spectacle to see a great Government Department faltering in its resolution to say" No" to the proposals for improvement in children's education in Britain today that is to say, where nursery schools and the Secretary of State are concerned. From all points of the compass the pressure is now intensifying and governmental embarrassment grows with each month. One gets the impression that even the Govern-men Front Bench now wants its arm twisted to say" Yes"

I am a little anxious that the movement for greater provision for nursery education may fall by the wayside to a degree because of local government reform, and I hope that when the Government Bill is implemented we shall not lose steam in our campaign.

The raised standard of living has given us strong, healthy children, but it appears to me that the new environment seems to restrict their activities and learning rather than liberate them, and many teachers are finding that many 5-year-olds coming into the schools have little of that rich culture of children's games and stories which the children used to have; they have been brainwashed by something like 3,000 hours of television before going to primary school. A child's life should not begin with this featureless and repetitive hypnosis. Unfortunately the communication of the home has been replaced by this one-way medium, and there has been a serious decline in the ability to communicate in the unnatural environment of television, high-rise flats and urban motorways.

In one respect we have reached a reasonable position in England and Wales as regards nursery schools. Previously we based our case on the professional experience and intuition of practising teachers who stated for example, that early experience of words, ideas and concepts in an environment of sympathetic interest and stimulus made all the difference to the later emotional, practical and intellectual development of the child. The teacher's hunch has now been at least partly reinforced by the studies of researchers in sociology and linguistics. I really believe that no Government should stand in the way of massive nursery school provision.

Everyone here knows that children who suffer deprivation in the earliest years of their lives rarely, if ever, make good the loss, and the only hope of their doing so is for us to provide as early as possible outside the home the experience and the stimulus which more fortunate children get in their homes. Yet I do not believe that all children in middle-class homes have ideal conditions either. There is frequently a humourlessness and iron discipline sufficient to depress the brightest of spirits. A lack of human warmth is as demoralising as is the most squalid slum home.

Nor is it only the urban child who suffers that deprivation. In my view the working-class child in an isolated rural community is greatly at risk. Because of the disappearing bus and rail services, the almost inevitable lack of a family car for those families, low wages and the tied cottage status, they are all virtually marooned. And mother and child are too often alone. This is a problem typical of rural Wales.

Allied to the isolation in Wales is the decline of the Welsh language. It is conceivable that bilingual nursery schools could help in the desperate struggle for the survival of our language in Wales. So I would propose in both England and Wales that, where nursery units are not possible at area schools, a nursery teacher who travels should visit outlying areas several times a week. I know that this is not an orthodox proposal but I would like the suggestion to be examined as to its feasibility. I understand that it is practised to some extent in the Australian outback.

I do not think that the educational development of children of the age of 2 to 4 years should depend upon the parents' ability to pay. At this crucial stage of development it should depend upon the social and educational needs of the child. The hon. Member for Aylesbury mentioned payment, and he mentioned unemployment too. It is a fact that we have many, many people unemployed, and the scale of charges which have been mentioned would be impossible for the families of those children whom we all of us wish to help.

I would make it clear that an unemployed person would not have to pay for a child's nursery education. It was always very much a part of the scheme put forward in the Plow-den Minority Report that there would be charges only on those people who could afford to pay them.

Another means test.

I take the hon. Member's point, but it seems to me to be a further drift to means testing.

However, even in Wales, where the record of provision of nursery schooling is better than that in England, it does not measure up to even 10 per cent. of the children who might enjoy nursery school facilities. So the conclusion I draw is that many of our working-class children are denied the full benefits of the educational opportunities at the compulsory stage because they are not able to get into nursery schools.

I would list in this manner priority groups in need of nursery education. I would like priority given to those children who are culturally deprived; children from overcrowded homes; children from families whose parents are mentally or physically unable to provide a good environment for their children; children who are physically or, to a degree, mentally handicapped; those children, too, who have abnormal behaviour difficulties; and obviously those children who are in need of temporary care. Perhaps others can add to the list, but those are the priorities which I have in mind.

There have been many doughty campaigners for nursery education and, whilst it is not for me to make a list of battle honours, surely high in the list must be the National Campaign for Nursery Education, the Nursery Schools Association and the National Federation of Parent-Teacher Associations, as well as the Pre-School Playgroups Association, of which I have the honour, in my own county, to be president. I may as well divulge an interest. I am a member of the National Union of Teachers. That body has been in the van for a number of years in trying to provide propaganda for the case for nursery school education. That great union, in part at least, is responsible, I believe, for the apparent mellowing of the attitude of the Secretary of State for Education and Science towards these matters.

As for the campaign for nursery schooling, I want to see its base broadened. I want to see us involving the leadership of the large manual unions, because we need, if I may say so carefully, at the front of the campaign men of weight as well as women, be they slim or weighty. Currently the image of the campaigners has a shade of middle-class jolly hockey sticks about it. I exclude straight away hon. Members of the House. The campaign must get away from that image.

I never bring my hockey stick to the House.

I think I have proved that there is much prejudice to be overcome. I want the working-class housewife to be involved in our campaign. There are far too many aldermen who believe that nursery schools are only ruses to benefit the ambitious wives of the bourgeoisie or lazy mothers on the council estate. The days are surely past when we regard a mother as a kitchen slave, and in my experience both mother and child benefit by separation during part of the day. Anyway, it is a stark fact that there are about 6 million married, widowed, divorced or separated women at work in Britain today. Our economy depends upon millions of married women who have children going out to work.

In conclusion, I want to see the speedy withdrawal of Circular 8/60; the development of a rural aid programme; an increase in the provision for the training of nursery teachers and assistants; public acceptance by the Government that a massive expansion of nursery education is a national priority; the development of a bigger campaign by the Government, local education authorities and other bodies to propagate the importance to youngsters of nursery schooling. Our ultimate aim should be the granting to every child of the same right of access to nursery education as to other stages of education. The future of our children is worth the price, say, of half a dozen supersonic jets which, after all, only service the Transatlantic expense account executive. I want a change in the order of priorities.

I, like hon. Members on both sides of the House, welcome the opportunity of discussing nursery education and preschool provision. I am not ashamed to take this opportunity of making a somewhat parochial speech. It is valuable to discuss a subject like this in the microcosm as well as in the macrocosm, to discuss it in terms of the great industrial City of Bradford as well as in national terms. Fridays are often best used for discussing matters of domestic policy of acute concern to constituents rather than great affairs of State.

Nursery education and pre-school provision are issues which should be recognised by the Conservative Party as being of doctrinal significance. The Conservative Party has always believed in maximising opportunity and realising the individual's full potential. In no area is this more so than in education, and above all in the pre-primary stage which provides the foundation upon which all else is to be built.

To take Bradford, of which I represent a fairly diverse part, as a typical example of a large industrial area, about one child in 10 is able to attend a nursery school or class. Yet the West Riding wool textile district is an area in which average earnings are lower than in any other industrial area in the country, even lower than they are in industrial Wales. It is also an area of a relatively high degree of social deprivation and immigrant settlement of long standing. In both these respects pre-school provision and nursery education have a great part to play in minimising the inequalities in the earliest stage of our educational system.

Both Conservative and Labour Governments have been aware of the importance of minimising these deprivations and have extended the urban aid programme, but much more needs to be done. Progressive local authorities like mine have to go to the Department of Education and Science for permission to provide nursery schooling and this consequence of Circular 8/60 is much to be regretted. Certainly under the auspices of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State the Department of Education and Science has been exceptionally ready to grant any request for nursery provision provided by the local authority as a private venture. No request from Bradford has been turned down. Nevertheless, we must as a party live up to our manifesto pledges on nursery education which I am sure the people of the country as a whole and not only enlightened educationalists remember very well.

Bradford prides itself, and has done since 1870, on being a progressive education authority. We have provided 19 infants' schools which give classes on a part-time basis for children in the nursery education stage. By September, 1972, we hope to increase this provision by a further 17 schools. But I emphasise that this is only part-time provision, and the great lack is of purpose-built nursery schools. We have one nursery school in my constituency of which we are extremely proud—the Green Lane Nursery School—which is in the heart of probably one of the biggest immigrant concentrations in the country, but this is not nearly enough. I emphasise that in cities like Bradford which have special problems more must be done at governmental level to help.

About 25 per cent. of the births in my city now are to immigrant parents. This means that about one-quarter of the children in areas like Bradford—which is predominantly of Asian settlement—will be brought up in a home in which English is not spoken as the mother tongue. The child is, therefore, at a serious disadvantage at the beginning of his education unless an effort is made to enable him to enjoy playgroups or nursery education. When one in 10 of the children of Bradford enjoys some form of nursery education, whether whole-time or part-time, and when one-quarter of the children being born are of immigrant descent, this proportionate disparity shows the extent of the problem.

Ours is a region in which traditionally a high proportion of women have gone out to work. They have done so because average earnings are low and because there are a great many special skills in the textile trade which have been done for generations most ably and skilfully, probably better than anywhere else in the world, by women. This will continue to be the case. In addition there is an increasing number of new industries like colour television and mail order firms which will necessarily employ a large female labour force.

I urge my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to do something to put our election manifesto pledges into action. I know that this is an expensive business and I understand the difficulties about cost. I realise that a full-time place in a nursery school is about the most expensive area of schooling. I understand that it costs something like £226 to provide a nursery school place as opposed to £103 for a primary school place and £196 for a secondary school place.

In my part of the world we are extremely grateful to my right hon. Friend for the big drive to replace the obsolete primary schools. About 6,000 obsolete primary schools are being modernised, replaced or improved by the Government. This programme will amount to £216 million over a four-year period. Nowhere is one more acutely conscious of what the Government are doing in this respect than in the older industrial cities which stand to benefit so much from this programme. None the less these are the very places which require an expansion in nursery education, and I am certain that my right hon. Friend will be mindful of this important fact.

The House is indebted to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Whitlock) and to the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison) for raising this important subject. Among the many vital matters we discuss, this, although it has attracted little support on a Friday morning, is one of the most important matters to be discussed in this House. I am glad that the right hon. Lady the Secretary of State for Education and Science has recognised this fact by coming here to deal with the debate.

I intervene as a lawyer in this debate with some trepidation, and perhaps I should tell the House why I have chosen to speak. In my early days as a young student reading for the Bar I used to sit on the steps of the then London County Council and wait for a teacher to become ill to give me the opportunity to take on supply work. In that way I gained experience of teaching in 40 London schools of all sorts, sizes and shapes and taught, among others, some children who were almost of nursery age. Therefore, I have always taken a great interest in this subject.

The Plowden Report was published in November, 1966. Chapter 9 deals in detail with the problem of the provision for children before the age of compulsory education, and that report made many valuable recommendations. Since then many Questions have been asked in the House dealing in one form or another with the implementation of these recommendations—the problem of nursery education.

On one occasion one Conservative Member had the temerity to remind the Government of the clear pledge made by the Conservatives in their election manifesto to increase the number of nursery schools and asked the Government for a crash programme to secure this end. The replies given then insisted that primary schools were a priority, that the urban programme had made some progress and that later the Minister" hoped" to turn to the needs of nursery education. Indeed, in March, 1971, the Minister stated that she was undertaking a general review of nursery schools and would undoubtedly look at the Plowden recommendations. But when asked about this in July, 1971, she said that there was no report, but that it was merely part of the Department's work. We are left in the dark as to what conclusions were drawn. We are left merely with the provision made for nursery schools in the urban programme.

No doubt some progress—indeed perhaps a good deal—has been made. I note that the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science on 9th March last said that nearly 18,000 additional places in England had been approved under the urban programme and that local authorities had been asked to submit further proposals. But I understand that there are still 13 authorities in England, apart from authorities in Wales, which have neither maintained nursery schools nor nursery classes. Although many years have elapsed since Plowden, we are a long way from the recommendation that the Department should assume as soon as possible a national policy in the structure of nursery education.

One recognises that there are priorities and that economic conditions must be taken into account. I have taken a great interest in this matter, and have interviewed a number of mothers and teachers so that I could keep up to date with their views.

A great many of them have told me —and this is in contradiction to the view put forward by one hon. Member opposite—that the years 1–5 are the most important learning years in the entire life span and that a child learns more rapidly in those years than ever again. With the majority of individuals, by 15 or 16 the learning process is completed and further development is due to maturity through experience. Therefore, it is more importaint to provide nursery education for all children rather than raise the school age.

We have only to consider the benefits a child receives from nursery education. I have tried to ascertain these needs, and I summarise them as follows.

First, there is the socialisation process, learning how to accept and adapt to other children and other adults in a new environment. Secondly, there is the widening of experience through playing with and handling a wide variety of objects such as sand, water, clay, paints, musical instruments and other things.

Thirdly, a small child acquires new skills; for example, learning how to hold correctly brushes, pencils and crayons and learning how to control the body through games and dances. Fourthly, there is the lingual development of children who are backward in language, who can make outstanding progress in a comparatively short time. This is of particular importance when a child comes from a culturally impoverished background.

Fifthly, it is important to simulate the child's imagination in a wide variety of ways by, for example, reading stories, singing nursery rhymes, providing materials for imaginative play, dressing up, building houses, playing with trains and similar activities

Teachers of reception classes in infant schools claim that even without any prior knowledge of a child's pre-school experience they have no difficulty whatsoever in picking out those children with some form of nursery education. The more socially and culturally deprived the background, the more nursery education is necessary.

We should all be grateful for this opportunity to focus attention on the need to deal with this problem. Despite the many calls upon them and the many pressing problems, I hope that the Government will move more rapidly and effectively in a real attempt to develop a national policy for the structure of nursery education along the lines put forward in the recommendations of the Plowden Committee.

I warmly support pre-school provision in the various forms in which it comes. I very much appreciate the efforts that my right hon. Friend has already put into providing nursery places in the educationally deprived areas. They have been referred to in passing, but no hon. Member so far has expressed any thanks for them.

In my view, nursery education is far more important than at the other end of the school age. I suppose it is water under the bridge now, but if I had been given the opportunity of deciding on priorities I should not have gone for raising the school leaving age. My preference would have been for making greater provision for nursery education. Children of 15 or 16 have the opportunity to continue their education if they wish. However, all too often nursery education is not available for their parents to give them the opportunity of it.

We have heard a certain amount about the value of nursery education. I was myself a teacher, though not of nursery age children. However, I was in a school where there was a nursery department. I found it extremely intriguing to see how rapidly little tots developed, especially in their ability to speak, when placed with other children. It was incredible to hear the complicated grammatical structures that they could come out with perfectly correctly, and their manipulative skills also developed rapidly. I shall never forget the occasion when I saw one small girl bend down firmly to a small boy whose shoe laces were trailing and do them up with remarkable speed and skill to send him on his way. As the hon. and learned Member for Stoke Newington and Hackney, North (Mr. Weitzman) said, teachers can pick out very quickly those who have had some pre-school provision when finally they arrive at the doors of their primary schools.

I believe it can also help mothers. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison) referred to the trying nature of children at this age. I can endorse that heartily. Mothers can become exhausted, because this is the time when children are full of questions and are exploring the world round them. It is the very time when one wants to get them through some sort of educational process. But it is exhausting. It should also be remembered that many of their mothers may be expecting another child or have a baby. It also helps the child whose nose is put out of joint at the age of 3 or 4. The Jesuits have a saying" Give me a child until the age of seven." That still holds good today.

There are those who argue against nursery education. I have met several mothers, most of them now middle-aged, who fear that younger mothers will simply push their children off and go out to work. One must take account of this fear, although I believe it is largely unjustified. My feeling is that part-time nursery education for 3 or 4 year olds is quite enough and that one should not look to full-time nursery education except where mothers must work of necessity. I believe that the Plowden Report estimated that there might be 15 per cent. of such children whose mothers for various reasons had to go out to work. But I do not believe that they should be encouraged to do so through the education system.

It is important to draw a distinction between nursery schools or classes and pre-school playgroups. I have the greatest admiration for the latter. But I have noticed a tendency, even amongst colleagues in this House who are not greatly interested in education or who do not regard education as one of their specialities, to muddle the two. That is very unwise. Playgroups have a great deal to offer, but they are not teaching groups in the way that nursery schools are. We must keep this distinction clearly in our minds. It may explain why certain members of the NUT do not favour the growth of playgroups. They feel that standards may not be high enough. I believe that that problem can be overcome.

There can be no doubt about what might be called the popular demand. We have had the example of thousands of mothers and children converging upon this House to present their petition to my right hon. Friend. Recently in my constituency a very enterprising local group did a survey of the requirements of preschool provision in the area. It found that only half the children in the area were receiving any pre-school provision. In my constituency there is only one nursery school, with a huge waiting list, and priority must go to those children whose difficulties are greater at home.

The conclusion of the survey was that the provision was patchy even within the area of the London Borough of Merton and that the need was greatest where the playgroup provision was least, in some of the working class areas. It made the valid point that even where church halls were available there was a lack of people to lead. Even so, it concluded that the London Borough of Merton was better catered for than many other areas. I think that gives an indication of the demand.

As other hon. Members have pointed out, it is when we turn to the means that we come to the difficulties. It is no good glossing over the fact that, in effect, we are asking the Government to commit themselves to what can only be described as a massive investment in terms of money, buildings and staff if we are to implement the recommendations of the Plowden Report, which suggested education for all at the age of 3 and 4, at any rate on a part-time basis.

In the course of the debate various figures have been bandied about. I, too, made my own researches before the debate began. The only conclusion to which I have come is that none of them add up. Whether that is due to my poverty in arithmetic or whether it is because there is no set ground, I do not know. But I should welcome a more authoritative statement from my right hon. Friend about the exact cost of providing nursery education and what we are likely to let ourselves in for if we try to implement the Plowden proposals. I hope that my right hon. Friend will allow some nursery education to go forward. I, too, share the belief that Circular 8/60 needs to be softened, and I hone that the restrictions can be lifted.

I should like to see greater encouragement given to playgroups. I hope that my right hon. Friend will encourage local authorities to ensure that there is at least one playgroup adviser in every authority, and possibly more than one after local government reorganisation, when we shall have very much larger educational units. Playgroups are a linchpin in ensuring that standards are high and that they rise.

I should like also to see far more courses for playgroup leaders, those who are sometimes called the gifted amateurs. There are a few, but the gifted amateurs of Merton have to go as far as Southwark, and I have no doubt that the position is even more difficult in other areas.

I should like to see greater grants given to playgroups. Very often they find the cost of renting halls a tremendous drain on their resources, and they are left with little for the equipment that they need. This is one direction in which we could make another useful contribution.

I believe that by encouraging mothers and playgroup leaders to go in for some form of training we shall be encouraging them possibly to train as nursery teachers in future. I have visited several playgroups in my constituency—unless any have sprung up recently, I have visited them all—where mothers have become so interested in the work that they are thinking of becoming either nursery or infant teachers. That would be a very fruitful source.

I should like to see nursery classes attached to primary schools. That would be cheaper than trying to set up nursery schools on their own. Again, we would like more expert advice on that matter.

It might be possible in the first instance to restrict nursery education to 4-year-olds rather than try to work in 3-year-olds and then the 4-year-olds. I am trying to give practical ways in which we might work towards the ideal.

I realise that fee-paying is a controversial subject, but I hope my right hon. Friend will look at that possibility, because half a loaf is better than none. I accept that we do not want to increase means testing, but it is hard to put this over when people are willing to nay for playgroups. They might be willing to pay if they could have nursery groups with remission of fees for those who cannot afford it. I hope that local authorities will be encouraged to remit fees for children now attending playgroups. I am sure there must be many who find even 35p a morning out of reach when all other considerations are worked out.

I have tried not to inflict on my right hon. Friend too heavy a financial burden and to suggest some ways in which we might work towards this ideal. I believe that it is one of the most important ends of the educational spectrum, one which for far too long under successive Governments has been neglected.

The whole House is indebted to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Whitlock) for putting this Motion on the Order Paper and giving us the chance to discuss nursery education. We are also indebted to the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison), who, sadly, has left the Chamber, for widening the sphere to deal with the whole area of pre-school provision. It is becoming increasing difficult to discuss nursery schools without looking at some of the matters which other lion. Members have raised, in particular the hon. Member for Merton and Morden (Miss Fookes).

Last Tuesday we had the under-5s lobby. It occurred to me when that lobby took place that the mothers of these children were those for whom nursery education was promised in the Education Act, 1944. They were themselves the under-5s at that time. I could not help wondering whether we would have to wait another 28 years and have the small children we saw last Tuesday lobbying for their children.

As many hon. Members have pointed out, progress in the provision of nursery education through governmental distribution has been very slow. The number of children receiving State nursery eduation has improved little since the commitment was given in the 1944 Education Act.

The hon. Member for Aylesbury, straining to avoid any political divisions in this debate, was right when he said that Circular 8/60 was infamous from the moment it was introduced and still remains so. Some of us have been saying this for a very long time. Circular 8/60 is the barrier to the development of any further nursery education, apart from the one or two concessions made in it about the urban aid programme, to which I want to refer later, and one or two other matters.

It is important to make clear what we are talking about. There has been a tendency to lump together various spheres of pre-school facility. I never understood, and did not understand when I spent a few months in the Department of Education and Science, why we divided and categorised our pre-school children in terms of administrative responsibility. I do not understand why we have one child in 10, which is a reasonable figure, in State nursery schools under the Department of Education and Science and large numbers in day nurseries, with child-minders, in playgroups and in residential centres under what is now the Social Services Department when we are dealing largely with the same group of children in the same age group and whose needs, if we are making out a case for the educational needs of those children, are the same in any area in which we may find them. This has been a mistaken development. I know how it arose, but I will not go into that now. Its history is partly derived from day nurseries during the war and other things. Nevertheless, successive Governments have failed to investigate the matter.

We must also consider the administrative confusion about when one pays and when one does not. There is no reason or logic in geography about the distribution of pre-school facilities. The few parents who are fortunate to have their children in State nursery schools do not pay, but if they send their children to a day nursery they do pay. Likewise with playgroups. In the overwhelming majority of cases one pays for them. The same applies in the case of childminders and children in residential nurseries.

Day nurseries are not the subject of the debate. Although pre-school facilities cover this sphere, there is a crisis concerning day nurseries. The hon. Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Wilkinson), who referred to working mothers and nursery schools in an informative speech to which I was pleased to listen, made the mistake which many make that one cannot equate the needs of working mothers with children going into nursery schools. Their needs are different. The crisis which has developed in the day nursery sphere and the lack of facilities mean that many of our pre-school children who do not go to nursery schools, either because such schools do not exist or because their mothers need them to be looked after all day, are finding their way into childminding, some of which may be good and some of which is deplorable. Local authorities know little about unregistered childminders, unless there is a tragedy and then the matter is highlighted. The more I look at this matter, the more appalled I am that we are not more vigilant about what is taking place.

The hon. Member for Aylesbury said that there was no evidence to show that children in nursery schools progressed better through the educational system than those who had not been to such schools. That did not in any way detract from his support for nursery schools. It depends what one is measuring. Is one measuring whether hon. Members of this House had nursery education and that that had some relevance to their getting here? Of course not. If one is measuring it in relation to GCEs and university entrance, it has no connection. However, where it does have a connection with the attainment and performance of young children is in relation to language, social independence and their attitude to learning when they get to school. That is where the case is so strong. Many doctors constantly refer pre-school children to nursery schools because they know they are in need of the stimulation which nursery schools can offer them. To relate nursery education to success does not bear examination.

Some of us may challenge some of the measurements of success which we use so frequently in the educational sphere. There is no doubt that Dr. Tessa Blackstone, who has done some research work on children in nursery schools, and others would bear out the argument that the child who has pre-school experience in a good nursery school or playgroup, other things being equal, will have a far better chance when starting school than the child who has been denied this opportunity.

I should like to make one or two comments about playgroups, because a lot has been said about them and I have always been a strong supporter of the playgroup movement. I think that many hon. Members are strong supporters of it. I am pleased that so many hon. Members have been present to debate this matter. If I may reminisce for a moment, it has always amused me that when I first came into the House six years ago and put down an Adjournment debate on playgroups, one hon. Member—I will not say on which side of the House—was heard to say to another," Are you going to stay for the playgroup debate?" The reply was," I did not know she was interested in drama". Since then most of us have become aware of what we mean by playgroups and provision for the pre-school child. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the playgroup movement for the way in which it has filled the gap for many young children in terms of making provision for them which they would not otherwise have had.

I do not think we should ever allow the playgroup movement to be a longterm substitute for nursery schools. Nor should we allow any Government to use the playgroup movement as an excuse for not providing nursery education. I have always believed that playgroups should come under the Department of Education and Science. I do not see how we can afford this departmental confusion over pre-school provision. I am aware of the difficulties of people who run playgroups, and I warmly welcome what was said by the hon. Lady the Member for Merton and Morden about the training of people involved in the running of playgroups and the provision that should be made through education.

Whatever the Secretary of State may say today about nursery schools we have to accept that we shall not overnight get provision for all 4- and 5-year-olds. The playgroup movement will be with us for a long time and we must therefore do what we can in terms of financial support and educational provision to make sure that it meets what we see in our nursery schools as well as reorganising and making provision for the way in which the movement has involved parents. This is a valuable part of its work.

I want to quarrel a little with the hon. Member for Aylesbury, because he has added a little to the confusion. He referred to a figure of one in 10 and said that this was not accurate. It may refer to children in nursery schools, but there is other pre-school provision. He included rising 5s at primary schools and residential nursersies. I am not sure whether he referred to day nurseries. A large number of rising 5s in primary schools are not getting nursery school experience, and this is something which concerns many people in the education world. These children go to school before they are 5, but many of them do not go into a nursery school atmosphere where the ratio of pupils to teachers is what it would be were they in nursery schools. Nor do they get the equipment and the nursery school stimulation which they ought to have.

On 13th April I asked the right hon. Lady about the regulations relating to rising 5s in primary schools and she said that the requirements about staffing and accommodation applicable to pupils in nursery schools were similar to those for rising 5s in primary schools. The regulations may exist but, unfortunately, the practice does not.

I think I am right in saying that recently the Department has been in touch with primary school heads about taking in under-5s and the sort of regulations and provisions which they ought to make. I hope before long to give the right hon. Lady the results of some work being done on this to show that if rising 5s are to be included in the number of children getting nursery school experience, we must ensure that nursery school experience is in fact what they are getting and that they are not merely being taken to school a little earlier.

I was sorry that the hon. Member for Aylesbury included children in residential nurseries among those getting pre-school experience. That cannot be so. The child in a residential nursery is at home, because that is his home. His circumstances are similar to those of a child at home with his mother. That is where he lives, perhaps because he does not have a mother or is homeless or because, for other reasons, he cannot live at home. Although imaginative things are being done in some residential nursery schools, we cannot allow ourselves to believe that these children can be included in nursery school provision. We must not allow that false impression to be created, because the fact is that they are not getting the nursery school experience which they would get were they to go to nursery schools.

Two or three hon. Members have raised the question of fees for nursery education. It has been argued that many parents would be prepared to pay for this education and that that is the way to provide it. It has always been a great fear of mine that that would be one of the recommendations made to the House before very long. That suggestion has been made by many people from time to time, including the minority on the Plowden Committee. I utterly reject the concept that payment for nursery education means that we have fulfilled our obligations to our pre-school children.

I think we are all agreed that nursery education is valuable and that it ought to be provided. I do not understand —if the right hon. Lady supports this concept perhaps she will explain the position—why we should make such education less important by demanding that people should pay for it when we do not make that demand in any other sphere of education. This is simply continuing the assumption that nursery education is the embroidery, the frill on our educational system. I deplore any concept which brings further means tests into any sphere of our lives, and most of all into education.

We all pay for education. Parents pay for it through rates and taxes. To say that if a parent wants nursery education for his child he should pay for it is to move away from the whole concept of a free educational system. Are we now, quite suddenly, to impose fees for children who are at present in nursery schools? We on this side of the House reject that concept. We have to decide where our priorities lie in education. I should put nursery school education before direct grant schools and before some of the subsidies paid to the private sector of education. In her excellent article in The Guardian my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short) suggested cuts in some areas of higher education. To do to nursery education what has happened to playgroups—that is, to make it a private provision—is to deny all that has been said about the necessity to widen the whole sphere of nursery education.

Several hon. Members, on both sides of the House, have referred to the importance of nursery education for the deprived child and the child from an inadequate background. The urban aid programme which we started, and which the present Government have continued, used deprivation as one of the standards to be adopted. That was right because the amount of money made available was very small. The need was enormous, and it was the first breakthrough in nursery school provision for a long time.

It is also right to say that we delude ourselves if we believe that by expanding educational facilities we expand educational opportunities. That is achieved only if, in using those expanded facilities, there is discrimination in favour of those who would not previously have benefited from them. I therefore do not quarrel with the idea that we should go first for the deprived child and try to do something about his poor environment, but there are many children in materially well endowed areas who are very deprived indeed. I am thinking of the parent who may not believe that there is any importance in his child learning through play or who is in restricted accommodation though he may be materially well-off in other respects. I am thinking too of the emotional pressures on many young children to grow up far soo soon.

One has to establish that all our children need nursery school education.

To allow ourselves to believe—I am not saying that anybody does; I do not want to overstate this—that only deprived children need nursery school education because it is a compensatory thing is a dangerous argument indeed.

I remember a 4-year-old child coming to my playgroup. She looked with horror at the sand and mess in the room and when I asked" Are you coming to play?" her mother replied" Angela does not play. Angela likes to work." That child, from a well endowed home, needed pre-school education in the playgroup sense more than many children from deprived homes.

I accept that one cannot expect provision to start at the age of 3 and be complete within a few months. We must start with the 4-year-olds but ultimately aim to provide nursery education for all children, though not on a compulsory basis.

It is clear when one thinks of high rise flats and large blocks that children would be better off, in terms of play space, if they were motor cars. More space is allowed for the parking of vehicles than for our young children in which to play. This is an added argument for the provision of nursery education, particularly in areas of high blocks and high rise flats. This applies particularly in areas where children have little or no play space, especially if they are only children or have only one brother or sister.

It is rare today to hear someone speaking in strong opposition to the whole concept of nursery education. The hon. Member for Merton and Morden mentioned this. The case has been so well established, especially after the campaign last Tuesday, that we must now decide how we are to find the means to achieve an adequate system of nursery education.

There is a great deal of sense in the argument that spending money on nursery education does much to remove the need to spend money later in school life on remedial teaching. I hope we will receive some good news from the Secretary of State today. I am sure she was moved by the lobby last Tuesday and intends now to say that at long last the under-5s are to receive that to which they are entitled.

It may be convenient for the House if I intervene at this stage to give some of the information and figures which have been requested.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Whitlock) on choosing this subject, and my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison), who, I believe, got in first with his choice of subject. Our worry at one time was that this debate would come second today and that there would therefore be only a short time for it. In the event, however, the hon. Member for Nottingham, North also agreed to raise this subject.

The interest displayed by the House in this whole matter exceeds the interest shown by the comparatively small attendance. I am sure that a large number of hon. Members who would otherwise have taken part in the debate have been affected by the difficulties of getting here today.

Both the hon. Member for Nottingham, North and my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury have chosen a subject on which there is a wide measure of agreement. I detect in today's debate a greater degree of agreement between the two sides than is customary in our debates in Parliament.

Ten days ago the National Campaign for Nursery Education delivered the second of its petitions in support of an expansion of provision for the under-5s. This impressive campaign has coincided with the publicity recently given to the forthcoming report by Dr. A. H. Halsey, which is to give prominence to the early education and experience of young children living in educational priority areas. Nursery education is being widely discussed not only by teachers and parents with a direct interest in it but throughout the education service and beyond.

Many local education authorities have expressed their support for the campaign —though it is fair to comment that not all of them are even employing their full quota of teachers in primary and secondary schools. I mention this to show that, however great their desire, they are also up against the problem of resource allocation, a problem which any Government must take into account.

This campaign has the support of members of all parties. In their attitude to nursery education, successive Governments have shared a common aim. They have also faced similar problems, and, in the end, have followed broadly the same policies, even retaining the same circular. When hon. Gentlemen opposite were the Government they realised that, however desirable an aim may be, it is necessary to make careful and deliberate choices and that this is a process which cannot yield instant results on all fronts.

We have heard a number of arguments in favour of nursery education, and I do not intend to repeat them at length. However, I want to make it clear before I re-state the Government's position that it is a case which I accept.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Merton and Morden (Miss Fookes) that nursery education fulfils three main objectives: to introduce young children to learning; to develop basic skills; and to provide more systematic stimulus than they are likely to receive at home. These are educational objectives with which I am particularly concerned, although there are also social considerations.

Early gains in all these areas can be improved further in the later stages of education, but I would single out the development of language as the most important, because poverty of language is the most potent source of educational handicap.

I also accept that although all children benefit from nursery education—with perhaps the rare exceptions to which my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury referred—it is most valuable for those whose homes are culturally and economically deprived and for those from all income groups or backgrounds who receive less attention than they should from their parents and families.

It is one of the distressing features that these children are found often coming from homes in what are sometimes called very good areas"; they have all the material benefits but do not necessarily receive the attention, affection or time from their parents which is so necessary at this early stage of their development. While resources are limited, I believe it right to follow the policy of the last Government and concentrate maintained nursery provision on the poorer areas by way of the urban programme.

These are what might be called the objective benefits. These benefits have, in turn, introduced another factor, and that is demand. I recognise that many thousands of teachers and parents are convinced of the need for nursery education and want it made more widely available. Last week's petition, with its 350,000 signatures—the petition forms were wheeled up to me in wheelbarrows by some charming small children—was an illustration of this demand.

Today's debate, like previous occasions, shows that the House has a good deal of sympathy with the movement, and outside bodies as different as the Association of Education Committees and the National Federation of Women's Institutes have supported the same cause. I welcome this support because I share the aims of those involved. Like them, I would like to see an expansion of nursery education.

I accept that the demand for places far outstrips the supply, and my aim is to let local authorities provide more places as soon as possible. But what I cannot do is to will the end without considering the means of achieving it; and before they jointly provide the means, neither the Government nor the local authorities can ignore the other claims on resources, both within and outside the education service.

Nursery education has, I am afraid, always been limited by competition with other desirable objects of expenditure. After the passing of the Education Act, the rapid rise in the post-war birth rate inevitably directed resources to the compulsory sector of education. There just were not enough primary and secondary school places and they had to be provided and provided quickly. They were provided, and provided comparatively quickly.

Then in the early 'sixties there came a specific shortage of trained teachers. This continued to limit the expansion of nursery education. When the supply of teachers began to increase, and it is increasing fast now, the Government of the day—both Governments—chose to reduce the size of classes in primary and secondary schools in preference to other possible options. Hon. Members will know that reduction in size of classes in primary and secondary schools has been a top priority. So the increased supply of teachers has gone to that object in preference to others. Raising the school age made further demands, particularly on capital expenditure, and, following their comparative neglect during the 'sixties, I made it my business to secure substantial allocations to improve and replace worn-out primary school buildings.

None of these decisions involves extravagant expenditure, or even, to use the words of the hon. Lady the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (

), lavish expenditure. But all involve the rejection of other ways of expanding or improving the education service, including provision for the under-5s.

In terms of national expenditure, education has improved its position. In 1961–62 total expenditure on the service was under £1,000 million, or 4·3 per cent. of the gross national product. By 1971–72 the figure had risen from £1,000 million to £2,900 million per annum, making it the second-largest service—pensions being the first; another desirable objective—accounting now for over 6 per cent. of the gross national product. For local authorities it is by far the most expensive service. These figures suggest not a service starved of funds but rather one whose appetite grows with what it feeds on. In this situation no Government can lightly commit themselves to substantial new items of expenditure.

I have already referred to some of the Government's priorities in educational expenditure. Our commitment to the raising of the school leaving age and the continued rise in the school population has required a substantial capital investment. To this we have added a primary school improvements programme, which has meant that the school building programmes authorised since 1970 have been the largest in our history. I am very well aware that no choice between priorities commands universal approval, but it would be perverse, I think, to claim that the improvement of Victorian primary schools was not long overdue.

Our present policy in nursery education is to build on what is already available by means of selective expansion in the deprived areas. January, 1971, is the latest date for which figures are available. I am sorry about this, but the January, 1972, figures should be available comparatively shortly. Hon. Members will know that return forms go out to the schools and are filled in in January of each year, but it takes some time to get them back and process the figures. For that reason, the latest figures I have are, as I say, for January, 1971.

By that date local authorities in England had provided nursery education for about 90,000 pupils. There were about 450 separate nursery schools and about 1,550 nursery classes attached to primary schools. Current expenditure on these pupils, at 1971 prices, was about £11 million a year. In addition, there were nearly 60,000 under-5s, excluding the rising-5s—incidentally, the definition of the rising-5s is children admitted at the beginning of the term in which they become 5—in other classes in primary schools, a number which is growing steadily as an increasing proportion of local authorities find themselves with spare classrooms and spare teachers in their primary schools. The number of places for under-5s has shown a steady, if unspectacular, increase; between 1966 and 1971 the number of full-time equivalent places in England rose from 80,000 to 125,000.

This means, after allowing for part-time attendance, that nearly 20 per cent. of 4-year-olds, excluding the rising-5s, and 2 per cent. of 3-year-olds are receiving pre-school education. Few of these places are attributable to the urban programme, which is just beginning to make a substantial impact in the deprived areas. Those increases have yet to come, and when I get the January, 1972, figures I expect them to show a considerable increase over those which I have given. The House will understand that I have given figures for England only, because I am not responsible for nursery education in Wales or in Scotland.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury quoted some figures for playgroups and I have figures for later than January, 1971. The latest figure I have—and I regard playgroups as extremely important —shows that there were about 260,000 children in playgroups in 1972. In addition, there are 40,000 children with childminders and 21,000 in local authority day nurseries. But the really significant and important figure is the 260,000 children now in playgroups.

I am sure that it is right to use the urban programme to expand nursery provision. Judging from what the hon. Member for Nottingham, North said, I think that would be his wish, because the essence of his speech was that we must meet the need in those areas where the social provision is such that children do not get the best chance in life. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would agree with that view.

Nearly 18,000 additional full-time places have been approved in England—7,500 since we came to office—and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has this last week announced a further phase which is being handled rather differently. For the first time, local authorities are being asked to arrange their proposals for all services in an order of preference. How many places we shall get by way of nursery provision under the latest phase of the urban programme will depend partly on the priority which local authorities themselves attach to proposals for nursery schools and classes. We have been rather cute here: in paragraph 4 of the circular we have managed to arrange the services, and it so happens that provision for nursery schools and classes comes first in the list of services drawn to the attention of local authorities. Under this phase there is an order of preference which local authorities can give to the different services which are available for aid under the programme.

Can the right hon. Lady tell the House now how much money is involved in the new allocation for the urban aid programme?

The new capital allocation will be between £2 million and £2½ million, covering all services, but I shall be very interested to see how many local authorities give nursery schools and classes top priority in the bids they put in.

Some of the places approved in earlier phases of the urban programme are now in use and will be included in the next lot of figures. In terms of 1971 prices, the total expenditure on nursery education—quite apart from playgroups, which is quite different—is now about 12·5 million, and on present policies the figure will rise to about £15 million by the mid-1970s.

In a number of areas the urban programme will mean a dramatic improvement in the scale of provision, in some cases doubling the previous number of places available for the under-5s. In Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds numbers will rise by one third, and in many other cities by more than a quarter.

Even areas which are already relatively well off for places, such as London and Manchester, will now be able to admit many more children. In inner London more than 2,000 places have been approved, and in Manchester, where nursery education is now provided for nearly 30 per cent. of the combined 3- and 4-year-olds, more than 500 places and in Nottingham 400 places. The pattern of expansion is uneven, but it is deliberately so because of the way in which the urban programme is operated. By the mid-'70s about 20 authorities, mainly in the North and North-West, will have places available in nursery and primary schools for one in five of their 3- and 4-year-old children, most of whom will live in the inner city areas.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Wilkinson) referred to some provision in his city, which I spent a day visiting recently, where I found the education provision most impressive and where I had a happy day. In addition to the 270 nursery places approved in Bradford under the urban programme, about 1,200 children under 5, excluding the rising-5s, attend maintained schools in Bradford. By the mid-'70s this will mean that about 15 per cent. of the combined 3 and 4-year-old age groups will be in school.

I recognise, of course, that many areas outside the scope of the urban programme have social and environmental problems, and the children in remote rural areas often contend with surroundings that are bleak and isolated and could benefit from nursery education. We were able to go a little way towards meeting this problem by including a few projects in the small towns and large villages of Devon and Somerset in the fifth phase of the programme, which concentrated on places of high unemployment. Nevertheless, it is still true that children living in downtown urban areas are probably the most acutely deprived, and for the time being this is where most of the nursery places will have to be provided.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, West also referred to the needs of the immigrant population. I know that many teachers and local authorities see a strong case for providing these children with an early opportunity to learn a new language and social customs so that they are not at an immediate disadvantage when they attend school at 5. Here the urban programme is of special assistance, because it covers those districts of large cities which commonly have a large immigrant population. More than 5,000, or well over a quarter, of the nursery places so far approved under the programme will be provided in the 11 local authority areas where the proportion of immigrant pupils exceeds 10 per cent. of the school population.

A number of hon. Members have made extensive references to playgroups. Although, under one of the last Acts of the last Government, playgroups are not my responsibility, I ought to mention them, because they are an important part of the existing provision for the under-5s. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury said, there are some people who are doubtful about the playgroup movement perhaps because they see it as a threat to the expansion of nursery education on more orthodox lines.

It is true, of course, that few playgroups can hope to match the standards of maintained nursery schools and classes. But I agree with my hon. Friend that standards of building are not everything and that a great deal can be done in buildings which themselves are not quite as well equipped as some of the nursery schools and classes. I know that many of the playgroups lack qualified staffs and have to operate in premises which are less than adequate, but, nevertheless, I go along with the hon. Lady the Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor) in saying that playgroups can and do make a valuable contribution to the educational development of young children where nursery education is not avail- able, and in some cases alongside nursery education.

In particular, a point on which both the Pre-School Playgroups Association and Doctor Halsey lay stress is that they encourage the active involvement of mothers in the running of the playgroup, and this may influence the future pattern of nursery education. The annual grants which the Pre-School Playgroups Association and the Save the Children Fund receive from my Department are in recognition of this great contribution.

I also welcome the help given to playgroups by local authorities in the form of grants, or, as my hon. Friend the Member for Merton and Morden pointed out, by appointing educational advisers and organising courses and helping with equipment and premises. In more than one area groups of playgroups are given advice and support by the local education authority adviser for nursery and infant education, and this, too, is extremely important if best use is to be made of the playgroup movement and if children are to derive the best facilities and the best education from it.

Would not the right hon. Lady agree that not only do children of such tender ages derive great benefit from playgroups but the young people who take them in hand to train them are able to find out whether they are suitable material for the teaching profession?

Perhaps the hon. Member is saying that the young people who go to help with playgroups are often stimulated to go into teaching by finding that they like working with children and are good at it. That may be so.

I regard as one of the most important results, particularly with playgroups starting in the deprived areas, the achievement of getting parents involved with the progress of the children, because in some areas parents may not have taken as much interest in the future progress of their children as one would wish. Where playgroups are started in these areas, parents begin to take more interest, and enormous consequences may flow from that for the future welfare of the children and the families as a whole. I should like to make it clear that I wish to encourage initiatives in deprived areas to set up more playgroups. They have been very successful, and I should welcome more of them.

I now come to the future pattern of provision. A number of hon. Members have looked ahead to a general expansion of nursery education and have offered or invited comments on the form that this expansion might take, particularly part-time provision. It is too early to provide a blueprint, but some trends are already clearly discernible. The growth in the number of part-time pupils is significant. Between 1960 and 1971 the number of part-timers rose from 4,000 to 58,000. One obvious advantage of this half-day provision is that it doubles the number of children who can receive nursery education for a given cost.

Although there are some children who will always need to attend full time for social reasons, unless day nursery provision is available for the rest of the day, there is evidence that many benefit from a more gradual introduction to school. Part-time provision is more beneficial for them than sudden full-time provision in school would be. I therefore expect the trend towards part-time provision to continue.

We have also had to give careful consideration to the choice between nursery classes in primary schools and separate nursery schools. Again, one form of provision is less expensive than the other, partly because of the higher staffing ratios in nursery schools and partly because nursery classes share overhead costs with the primary school. I was interested to see that this was one of the choices discussed in a recent article by Sir William Alexander. Like the previous example of part-time provision, it illustrates a way in which we may be able to get more for our money when resources become available.

Perhaps it would be convenient to mention charges at this point because a number of my hon. Friends have raised the subject. They suggested that part of the cost of making nursery education more widely available might be found by introducing charges. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury pointed out that this was one of the recommendations of the minority on the Plowden Committee, and that he was one of that minority. We greatly value his views. I can see why this idea continues to appeal to some of those who want to see the wide expansion of nursery education but are concerned, rightly with the resource implications of such an expansion.

In my view there are serious practical difficulties about such a proposal. Perhaps I can give a few examples. Such a scheme of charges would have to recognise the already widespread practice of admitting children to primary schools before their fifth birthday. The scope for charging would need to be correspondingly limited. Quite elaborate remission arrangements would be necessary for children from poorer families, but, even so, there could be no guarantee that some children most in need of nursery education would not be prevented from obtaining it.

Difficulties would also arise over the collection of fees because we are dealing with very small children and there would be difficulties of a kind not experienced where fees are now charged at the upper end of the education system. Again, would it be right to impose a duty upon local education authorities to charge or should they be given a discretionary power to do so which could be expected to lead to unwelcome diversity of practice as between one area and another?

Leaving aside the issue of principle about the introduction of charges at maintained schools—these comments refer to maintained schools—we must attach considerable weight to the substantial practical difficulties. My hon. Friend referred also to schools which are not maintained. There are such things as direct grant nursery schools where the capital provision is made by the parents, who raise money by the time-honoured methods of raising money which are familiar to all political parties and all charities. The Government give a grant to those schools for running costs. They are not maintained schools; they are part of the independent system with grant aid from the Government. That is a different concept but one which may find favour in some areas.

There has been some criticism of the present division of responsibility between the DES and local education authorities on the one hand and the Department of Health and Social Security and the local social services departments on the other.

I recognise that the traditional distinction between education and social provision can become wholly artificial for many young children, particularly in deprived areas. Education and care are really different aspects of concern with the children's mental and physical wellbeing. All children who for one reason or another need care for the whole day because of home circumstances will also benefit from nursery education. It is in recognition of the complementary role of education and other social services that the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Health and Social Security are working together to consider the needs of the under-5s in different kinds of provision.

As an example of active co-operation, a number of experimental projects have been approved under the urban programme which combine the facilities of a day nursery and a nursery school. There is a clear distinction in principle between the aims of nursery education and those of day nurseries or other arrangements for child-minding. Although the case for nursery education holds good for most children, only a small minority also

require full-time day care. Day care provision and nursery education complement each other for this minority but it is important to recognise that they fulfil different functions.

It is not sensible to detach the education of the under-5s from the mainstream of educational provision. By the same argument we cannot easily separate the social needs of this age group from the main social services. The answer really lies not so much in who has departmental responsibility but in securing maximum co-operation between the two services, both centrally and locally so that, whoever has the responsibility, the children will get what they need socially and educationally.

My hon. Friend the Member for Merton and Morden asked me to give some figures about what nursery provision for all would cost. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury quoted some figures about present costs, and I want to take up this theme because I began by emphasising the need to make choices in the allocation of resources and I would like to end by returning to the same theme. I have quoted the current annual expenditure on nursery education. In 1971–72 the cost of maintaining existing nursery schools and classes in England which provide about 65,000 full-time equivalent places was over £12 million—an average cost per place of nearly £200. The comparable figure for primary schools was just over £100 per place and for secondary schools just under £200. The main reason for the high recurrent cost of nursery education is that young children need not only ample and well-equipped space for their energetic activities but a generous ratio of trained adults. The total staffing ratios, including nursery assistants, are about 1:10 in nursery schools and 1:13 in nursery classes. This means that staffing costs alone in nursery schools and classes reach about £180 and £100 per place respectively.

These figures would be very much higher if nursery education was staffed wholly by qualified teachers at a ratio of between 1:10 and 1:15 instead of the present mixture of teachers and nursery assistants. It seems likely that when we can embark on a major expansion of nursery education we must expect something similar to the present pattern and scale of staffing to be retained.

On this basis, we estimate that to provide nursery education throughout the country, mainly on a part-time basis on the scale recommended in Plowden, would add about £50 million a year to current expenditure and involve £100 million worth of capital expenditure. These are relatively large sums, and there are a number of ways in which we could use them. The Labour Party's Science and Education Sub-Committee in its Report on Educational Strategy made the same point about priorities a fortnight ago when it said:

" however much the education budget grows, choices will have to be made."

It is for the Government of the day to take major decisions about resource allocations, difficult or even painful though they may be. We have to consider the various choices open to us. Hon. Members have referred to some and have asked, for instance, how far we should continue expenditure on higher education, which has been a priority up to now. There are various other choices open and various demands—

I am interested to hear the right hon. Lady talking about the obvious problem of priorities. Last week she refused, in an answer to me, to produce a Green Paper on the way in which she arrives at her priorities. Is she prepared to come along to the Public Expenditure Committee and argue in detail the case for the priorities that she reaches within her Department between one kind of education and another?

I have never refused any invitation which I received in my ministerial capacity to appear before any Committee of the House. I very much enjoy the experience. I have not yet been cross-examined by the hon. Gentleman. I have no doubt that such a cross-examination would be interesting. Even some of the replies to it might be interesting. But, whichever party is in power, these choices must be made, and it is the Government's job to make them.

I am happy to accept both Motions as an expression of the kind of priority which the House attaches to this subject and in the spirit that the Government must take the wishes of the House into account in making their decisions on educational priorities. I have made a fairly long speech, but I hope that when hon. Members read it they will appreciate that I have given as much information as possible in order to assist future debate on this subject and to compare it with future subjects on other aspects of educational need. I congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham, North and my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury on their choice of subject and thank them for giving me the opportunity of contributing to the debate.

I think that this is the first time, certainly since I became a Member of the House, that we have had the opportunity of spending a whole day on debating nursery education. We are all grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Whitlock) and the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison) who have made this possible.

I am very grateful and delighted that the right hon. Lady the Secretary of State came to the House and I am glad that she was able to make the speech which she made, although when we look at it I do not think we shall find that it offers very much hard cash. It dealt with prospects. It is a gain that the Minister is taking a long-term view. It is a considerable gain that she has said twice, yesterday and today, that she understands the educational argument for nursery education, so that no more shall we have to argue, at least with the present Minister, the educational case for nursery education provision. That is a very important milestone, and I hope that we make good progress from it.

The hon. Member for Aylesbury rather twitted my hon. Friend the Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor) about her adjective concerning Circular 8/60. My hon. Friend called it" infamous" . When my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short) was Secretary of State and Baroness Bacon, who was formerly the right hon. Member for Leeds, South-East, was Minister of State at the Department, on two occasions I took two deputations—one from the Nursery School Association, of which I am president, and another from the Campaign for Nursery Education, of which I am also president—to see both Ministers, not at the same time but separately, to argue the same case that we argued when we met the present Secretary of State in December. 1971, when a joint deputation from both bodies argued for the expansion of nursery education, for more money to be found and for the withdrawal of Circular 8/60. We have therefore campaigned against Ministers of Labour and Conservative Governments because we were not satisfied with what they were doing.

I wish to say a few words about the playgroup movement, which must obviously be discussed in a debate on nursery education. The playgroup movement began simply because there was not the provision for nursery education which all of us wanted to see—and when I say" all of us" I mean parents, teachers, educationists and others interested in the pre-school child. It was a laudable attempt at" do-it-yourself" nursery education.

Many of the playgroups are doing a marvellous job. Some of them are run by trained nursery teachers. I should like the Secretary of State to take over responsibility for playgroups which are well run by trained nursery teachers and see whether they can be incorporated in those nursery schools and classes for which she is now responible. They are well up to standard and with a little help from her in improving the premises on which they are run we could increase the number of nursery school places.

The question of parental involvement is important. However, we must be honest and face the fact that most of the playgroups flourish in areas where mothers are able to band together and organise playgroups and take responsibility for the children. They may be former teachers or former nursery teachers, or they may have worked as nurses or nursery nurses and therefore know something about the education of young children. But in the areas of greatest deprivation—and I am thinking of educational priority areas like my constituency—there are not many mothers who are equipped to do this sort of work. The playgroup movement has inevitably tended to be thickest on the ground in the middle-class areas where people are able to take the initiative and provide pre-school facilities for their children.

The other side of the coin is that in the education priority areas where, thanks to the urban aid programme which the Labour Government introduced, we have set up nursery classes and schools, one of the encouraging things is that parents are becoming involved in the education of their children attending the nursery schools. We have seen this development recently in many parts of the country. Many nursery teachers have reported it to me. We should be very glad about this development, and I assume that it will continue. Nursery schools do not preclude parental involvement.

The standards of playgroups are variable. No one has the responsibility to ensure that education standards are improved. It is not the responsibility of the Secretary of State because they do not come under her jurisdiction. It is not the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Social Services to be concerned with education standards. He is involved with the number of lavatories and washbasins and the number of children accommodated in the premises.

This is not good enough. It adds to the argument that there should be administrative consolidation so that the right hon. Lady the Secretary of State can be responsible for standards in all pre-school provision and for training the people who will be working with the children and for ensuring that where education standards do not exist they are introduced and maintained.

The suggestion of the hon. Lady the Member for Merton and Morden (Miss Fookes) that where infant schools are built there should be provision for nursery classes was a welcome endorsement of proposals we have made to the right hon. Lady. One of the interesting things about this debate has been to see so many hon. Members on the Government side now interested in nursery education and taking part in the debate today, and who have made such a careful study of the newsletters produced by the Campaign for Nursery Education which has given a good deal of ammunition and information about the progress of nursery education and the aims and objects of the campaign and the kinds of things we are hoping to achieve. That interest has been to me very gratifying.

The hon. Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Wilkinson) spoke about the needs of his constituency. I wonder whether the right hon. Lady has thought about this problem. We are now turning out some 1,300 trained nursery teachers a year from the increased provision which was started by the right hon. Lady's predecessor, and there are now 43 colleges of education where courses for nursery teachers are held. The 1,300 nursery teachers trained every year look for jobs, and that is an argument for increasing the number of nursery classes. I mention this in connection with Bradford because I was in Bradford not so long ago and spoke at a public meeting held in support of nursery education. The right hon. Lady was there herself recently. I think she was there after I was. The case was put to me by the senior lecturer in charge of the training department that there is an urgent need for nursery teacher training and that in Bradford there was difficulty in finding adequate facilities in which student teachers could do their practical work in nursery education. Although Bradford has some provision there is presumably a shortage of suitable nursery classes for the students to do their practical work. One thing I want to do if I can is to put some ideas to the right hon. Lady about the money she thinks she may need. The more modest amount we have suggested, spread over a longer period of time, would be a considerable and welcome addition to the small amount spent on nursery education in the urban aid programme.

We are backed in this by the great support outside to which the right hon. Lady has referred and which culminated in the petition presented to her and in the resolution at the N.U.T. conference at Easter, the resolution which demanded the same thing as that for which the petitioners were asking—expansion of nursery education of children from 3 to 5.

Let me make it absolutely clear that we are not rigid on the question of full-time or part-time; as to that we are completely flexible; but we are asking for part-time and for an allowance and a modicum of full-time education based on the need of the child and the family. We are supported by the overwhelming majority of public opinion in the profession and in the country outside.

We have to bear in mind that in nursery education we compare badly with other countries in Europe, East and West. I have seen in some of them the nursery provisions which they have made and I have felt very regretful that our own nursery provision comes so far below theirs. Smaller countries than ours are able to provide better than we do. I cite the example of Sweden, which has nursery education and day nursery education provision far in advance of ours and has had for a much longer time; and that country has a small population of less than 10 million. Yet no new estate is built anywhere in Sweden without providing a kindergarten and a day nursery for the very tiny children; no housing estate is ever built without a playground for the young children and sited so that there can be some supervision over them from the flats and houses on the estate where the children live. So they have well protected play spaces.

That is something which we cannot persuade the housing authorities in this country to do. It is simple, it is inexpensive; it can be done at practically no cost where new housing estates are planned, whether local authority or private enterprise estates.

I wonder whether the right hon. Lady would use her influence with her right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment to bring together the two Departments to see whether more provision could be made for children by using resources of both Departments and putting some proposals to the local authorities which are education and housing authorities. It has always seemed to me that having those two Departments, which could make progress in this field, in two separate compartments in this way has been an obstacle to better provision for young children.

In the same way I suggest to the right hon. Lady, as, again, I suggested to her predecessor—and it is not only to the right hon. Lady I am making this suggestion—that on the ground floors of blocks of flats, housing committees might make provision for nursery classes, one or two, for children from 3 to 5. One could find ground-floor accommodation to provide play space among the houses and flats where the children live, play spaces where there would be no difficulty about, for example, having to cross major roads. This has always seemed to me to be the most inexpensive way of providing the capital needs for nursery classes on a new estate. I hope that the right hon. Lady will take up these two matters with her right hon. Friend.

I think the right hon. Lady needs to have a look in her own Department at the way in which this very large amount of money, almost £3,000 million a year for education, is being spent. I know the argument on priorities is always a very difficult one and I know that when in opposition it is very easy to say" Yes, we must do this and we will do it when we get the opportunity". When we get the opportunity we are diverted from doing what we said we would; Ministers are under pressure from all kinds of bodies and organisations which themselves want to have a share of the money at Ministers' disposal. However, there is now an urgent need for a very careful, close look within the Department at the way in which this money is spent.

I would put first of all the need to investigate more carefully the amount of money spent on what we are pleased to call remedial teaching. This is money spent throughout the country. It is money for teachers, too. It is expensive to have either additional teachers on staffs or peripatetic teachers who go round several schools and take out groups of children from their class. This happens in educational priority areas and other areas as well. It happens at infant and junior schools, and I am sorry to say it happens at secondary school level. The fact that this happens at secondary school level means, I submit, that the system has failed in its object. If it had been successful it would not have been necessary to take it to secondary school level. There are teachers who will say that there are children who have gone through the whole of their school lives in remedial classes and still leave school at the age of 15 practically illiterate, able to read perhaps only the headlines of the sports pages of the newspapers. This is a terrible indictment of the present method which we have of dealing with children who are educationally backward. It is an indictment of a system which has gone on for some time without change and without sufficient critical examination.

Here is a very fruitful way in which the right hon. Lady might find how the money is spent, by finding out how much is spent on remedial teaching. I remember putting a Question to her some time ago, and she did not know the answer. It is possible to find out, by asking local education authorities, how many teachers are involved, and the amount of money and of materials and the rest and the total required might surprise very many of us who are interested in education. It might indicate to the right hon. Lady that she should look at this matter again, when she might feel that some of the money might be better spent on nursery education. We all agree that nursery education provides the foundation for the rest of the education system.

I disagree profoundly with the right hon. Lady when she reiterates her pledge to concentrate on primary school building. This presupposes that nursery education is not part of primary school education. Now that she is convinced of the educational arguments the right hon. Lady must go one step further and say that nursery education is part of the primary sector and should have its fair share of the money she is spending on primary education.

Figures have been given today of the cost per place of nursery education. The cost of providing a university residential place is many times the cost of providing a full-time nursery place. The latest figure for a university place was given yesterday by the Under-Secretary of State at £1,300. In comparison the provision of a nursery place is not expensive.

My feeling is that much of the university hostel accommodation is too elaborate. The students themselves would prefer it to be simpler. They do not need the lavish meeting places inside hostels which duplicate those provided by the union. Some years ago I went back to my old University of Manchester and saw the new union building which was enormous, with large meeting places, large coffee bars and a large entrance hall—over-lavish provision in many ways. I have been to several other universities and found the same. Students say that they want some provision for social activities but do not want such elaborate accommodation as they have been given. Economies could be made in new university development and expansion, hostel accommodation, university libraries and so on.

The Expenditure Sub-Committee responsible for the Department of Education and Science should investigate the way in which priorities are decided within the Department. I hope it will be possible for that Sub-Committee to find ways of saving money on some aspects of education and using it for the expansion of nursery education. What was the justification for giving away £2 million to reduce the fees paid in the direct grant schools when that money could have been much better spent on nursery education than on reducing fees to the direct grant schools?

Unless we give those schools some help they will not be able to carry on. The cost of taking over the schools completely would far exceed the £2 million they were given, so it made good resource allocation sense to give them a little help.

That is not the only method available for helping them to continue. They might charge higher fees.

That is what happens with transport and rents—the consumer pays more.

If my recollection is correct, 50 per cent. of the places are free places.

I will not continue the argument. I am merely saying that the members of the Expenditure Sub-Committee would want to know why that decision was taken. It is necessary for us to know what options are before a Minister and why one decision is made rather than another. There should be much more flexibility in the sources of revenue for nursery education. For example, we might ask hospitals to provide nursery accommodation for the women who work there. Hospitals employ large numbers of women, from the few women consultants to perhaps the most important core in the hospital, the kitchens. Only 17 hospitals have nursery accommodation. Hospitals are always short of staff and the provision of more nursery groups might attract younger women with useful skills to the hospital service. The regional hospital boards could provide the accommodation and the right hon. Lady could make sure that trained teachers were available. The same should apply to local government and the Civil Service.

Suggestions have been made for the setting up of nursery classes at the BBC. Much more could be done along these lines by industry. In the Soviet Union all large factories employing women have attached to them a kindergarten and day nursery. Such women represent a large educational investment and their talents are brought back into circulation. If industry in this country were to meet the capital cost of this provision, it would relieve the right hon. Lady of one burden and she could then be responsible for seeing that standards of accommodation are maintained and that teachers are made available.

I should like to draw attention to a development in nursery educaion which has been carried out at the Hillfields Nursery Centre, Coventry. This provides an exciting way of combining day nursery provision with nursery school facilities on a full-time or part-time basis. The advantage of a nursery centre is that the arrangement is extremely flexible.

Day nurseries tend to cater for mothers in jobs. Although it is generally believed that mothers who want nursery education for their children do not have jobs, many mothers are in employment. Day nurseries start early in the morning and go on until late at night, often beginning as early as 7 o'clock in the morning and continuing until 6 p.m., whereas nursery schools normally operate from 9 a.m. until 3.30 in the afternoon.

The advantage of the nursery centre is that there is somebody there early in the morning to receive the child and somebody very much later in the day to hand over the child to the mother. This is a marvellous idea. It has been well organised in Coventry where it has been possible to bring together provision for education and also social service provision, thus involving the two departments in one building. This was done by agreement with both groups and it is working well.

I should like to mention the problems of those who work in the nursery schools. The Hillfields experiment brings out the difficulties quite clearly. Nursery nurses are on duty early in the morning to receive the children and they wait until the early evening for the mothers to collect their charges. There are a large number of nursery nurses and the girls are trained for this work, but I am sorry to say that many of these girls carry out all the responsibilities of nursery teachers and are in charge of classes.

The right hon. Lady mentioned the expansion of nursery provision in Manchester, which is a case in point. She will see from the figures that, although there are a large number of children in nursery places in Manchester, many children are being taught by nursery nurses who are not trained nursery teachers, simply because Manchester for some reason cannot provide enough nursery teachers. I do not know why this is the situation, but nursery nurses are doing precisely the same work as nursery teachers though they are certainly not getting the same salaries as nursery teachers.

I received a letter from one of the right hon. Lady's inspectors who is responsible for the inspection of nursery education facilities. She is concerned about the salaries paid to nursery nurses in schools and classes and emphasise the high turnover in the number of these girls who are trained as nursery nurses. Most of them are between 18 and 23 and there is a turnover of almost 50 per cent.

The general reason given for this state of affairs is that salaries are too low. The girls' take-home pay at the end of the month, after deduction, is about £10 per week—just over £40 a month. This is a miserable salary for trained staff. It must be emphasised that they undergo a two-year training period and the education standards required for these nurses are high. They are expected to be almost as good on entry to these courses as students who take a three-year training course to be teachers. The starting rate is poor, £654 a year at age 20 or above, and it can rise to only £924. Therefore, by the time they are 26 years old they may have reached the maximum of just over £900. It is surely a poor career prospect for these girls that when fully trained they can earn less than £1,000. This is not good enough. Many of these girls have to travel considerable distances to work in nursery classes and have to bear their own travelling expenses, which makes it extremely difficult for them to carry on.

Not only are the salaries much lower as compared with those of nursery teachers, but their conditions of work leave much to be desired. They can often be asked to work long hours, but compared with teachers they get shorter holidays. They have four weeks' holiday a year, whereas a teacher normally has 12 weeks or more. It is clear that something needs to be done to improve the conditions of nursery assistants and nursery nurses who are carrying out such a marvellous job and without whom most of our nursery teachers would find it difficult to continue.

I hope that it will be possible for the right hon. Lady to take steps to do more to consolidate an administration which is now divided. If the nation is mean and parsimonious at this early vital stage in a child's life, this will mean that those children will be affected right up to secondary school age.

Because there are such vast areas of deprivation in many parts of our community—intellectual, environmental and emotional deprivation—this means that in compensating for this lack we shall need to bring about the greatest development in this form of early education. It is essential that a child's life must be given the right foundation.

I shall not detain the House for quite as long as did the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short). All who have contributed to this debate have accepted the need for pre-primary education, and I include my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science. Judging by her remarks, the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East appeared rather to imply that my right hon. Friend is a recent convert to the view that pre-primary education is desirable. This is not so. My right hon. Friend has accepted the concept for a very long time.

I agree with what has been said about playgroups and the work done by charitable bodies in this connection. The Save The Children Fund has done wonderful work and in my view is one of the finest and best-run charities we have. It fulfils a most valuable function and I hope the Department will continue to support it. It is of great value in helping to fill the gap until more resources can be found in terms of national provision for pre-primary education on the scale we all want to see as soon as practicable.

There is this growing demand for preprimary education of which we are all aware. In my constituency the demand seems to come partly from well-educated young women, many of whom are paying for places for their children at nursery schools or playgroups and feel so strongly that their children benefit from it that they would like to see similar facilities extended to the complete range of children throughout the community. This movement of opinion is no worse for the fact that it comes largely from that section of the community.

However, it is interesting to ask why the demand should seem suddenly to be growing now. After all, the needs of children aged 3 and 4 must have been much the same 10, 20 and 30 years ago, yet there was not this surge of opinion towards a pre-primary provision in those days. Perhaps this has to be looked at in an historical context. One might say that 100 years ago people were campaigning for universal elementary education. It came. One might say that 30 or 40 years ago the cry was for secondary education for all. That came. Then, 10 or 15 years ago people urged a massive expansion in university provision, and we have seen that come over the last decade. Now it is the turn of nursery schools, and the demand is reaching its peak. I have no doubt that the Plowden Report has been largely responsible for this. However, the National Campaign for Nursery Education has played its part in awakening public opinion.

It is easy to say, as I am saying, that one is in favour of more nursery school education. But one has to look at the costs involved. It is not honest to advocate a cause without saying anything about the costs, which in this case are very substantial.

In the course of the last General Election campaign I was at pains to make clear that I was strongly in favour of the policy of spending more on the replacement of obsolete and obsolescent primary schools. The Government are now doing this very successfully. No one should underestimate the difficulty of the task, and I for one very much recognise what my right hon. Friend has done. Only a fortnight ago I received a letter from a parent-teacher association at Trafalgar School, a primary school in my constituency which is overcrowded and urgently needs some addition. I shall be writing to my right hon. Friend about that school shortly. I know that she has done sterling work in getting more money out of the Treasury for primary schools.

I also said at the last General Election that I was in favour of reductions in taxation. Therefore, I cannot speak as if an extra £50 million or £100 million, which is what the universal extension of pre-primary schools would cost, amounts to nothing. However, the Treasury should be asked to look at the economic benefits as well as the cost. The Treasury tends rather temperamentally to put the expenditures of different Government Departments in different pigeon holes with so much for this Department and so much for that. It does not examine sufficiently the wider economic benefits which can arise, and which I suggest would arise, from more expenditure on nursery education.

One has to consider, for example, the fact that a proportion of mothers of children aged between 3 and 4 would return to productive work. Their earning and spending as a consequence would yield some taxation revenue to the Exchequer. One wonders whether the Treasury has made any estimate of that. One then has to consider the fact that if children have gone to nursery schools they do better afterwards aft primary schools. The result is that the money provided for primary schools becomes more cost-effective. Perhaps one might even argue that the extension of nursery school provision will result in the better adjustment of children to living and sharing with one another and may lead in the long run to less juvenile delinquency, resulting in considerable financial savings to other Government Departments such as the Home Office, quite apart from the non-financial benefits which can accrue. I hope that my right hon. Friend will put these points to the Treasury when seeking over the years to get more money for the provision of nursery education.

I hope, too, that another look will be taken at Circular 8/60. It was drafted very much with the then shortage of teachers in mind. Although that shortage has not been solved all over the country. it is very much on the way to solution. Therefore, a prime cause for issuing Circular 8/60 has disappeared. I hope that my right hon. Friend will give full consideration to that point.

I am very pleased to be called shortly after the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short) because I want to take up one or two of the points she made. Before coming to them, however, I want to ask my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary to thank my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for taking part in the debate today and also for the provision of two new nursery schools in Plymouth. I am sorry that my right hon. Friend is not here to hear me say that.

It would be a great pity if some of our public schools were closed, as some hon. Members opposite have suggested, because that would mean that there was less money available for State schools.

As for grant-aided schools, one has to think also of the Roman Catholic and Church of England schools. I understand that under our Education Acts people have the right to choose the type of religious education they wish their children to have.

I was astonished by what the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East said about remedial teaching. It has a very important part to play in helping late developers, and many children benefit tremendously from it.

With regard to universities, one has to remember the various foundations which help to provide funds for this type of education. At Exeter University, for example, there is the Northcutt Foundation. Not all the money comes from the State.

The hon. Lady referred to the position in Sweden. I want to tell her that in one of our housing estates in Plymouth we have a playgroup especially provided, and there is one on the Royal Naval estate.

Women who have adequate education should be encouraged to run playgroups, because that allows the others who need payment to go to areas where they are most needed.

I hope that more men will come forward for training as nursery teachers. A man teacher can prove to be of great benefit to the child of a one-parent family. The children have their mothers at home, but they need the other element in their lives. I hope to see more men teachers in the future.

The reason why I am interested in this subject is because I taught originally in nursery schools under the Froebel and Pestalozzi systems, following which I went to Australia, where with the Flying Doctor Service, I learned the PEU system of education.

When I was in Malaysia I started a nursery school, because there was an Act which said that each Government Department with more than 50 women employees had to provide accommodation for some type of playgroup or school for the children. That gave me added experience and also led me to realise what a benefit it was to this type of child.

I recognise that the population of the world has greatly increased in the last 20 years. However, it is a fact that there are now 100 million adult illiterates in the world, and when reading the reports in this country we cannot be very pleased with the academic qualifications of a great many of our young people. It was agreed by both sides of this House that we should put the school leaving age up to 16 but I, like my hon. Friend the Member for Merton and Morden (Miss Fookes), would have preferred to start with the younger age group. Anybody who wishes to stay on at school can do so until the age of 16 or later now. Raising the school leaving age and not starting with the younger children was a mistake.

We must be careful that nursery schools do not become places for dumping children. An article on this subject which appeared in The Times of 2nd March states:

" the Belgian authorities and the Church can congratulate themselves that pre-school education has become an accepted and general feature of Belgian life. But the fact that a growing number of parents are abusing the system by dumping their small children at school for up to 12 hours a day has alarming implications for the future" .

We have to balance these two aspects.

I realised that by the time I came to speak today I should probably need to have two speeches ready because most of the points would have been taken. However, I should like to look at what is happening in some other countries. I have taken the Commonwealth country of New Zealand, because it was the pioneer, where there are free kindergarten schools—they are called" free", but some payment is made if the parent can afford it—which are controlled by the Free Kindergarten Association. That is a voluntary organisation formed for that purpose. New Zealand also has play centres controlled by the Play Centre Association. The Government—I think this is a good method of doing it; I have seen this for myself—makes grants available to kindergarten students in training and accept responsibility for the cost of sites and buildings for training centres. Salaries are paid by the Department of Education which subsidises the contributions for the purchase of land. First, they have to get a group of persons in the community to decide that they will run the school once it is put on the building site recommended by the Government. New Zealand has a small population, but the figures for 1969 show that there were 293 free kindergartens with 22,933 children. The Play Centre Association also receives an annual maintenance and liaison grant in respect of its centres. It helps to a certain extent with equipment and small establishment grants towards the initial cost of the new centres. In July, 1969, there were 520 recognised play centres with over 15,000 children attending. Unfortunately, in the United Kingdom only about 10 per cent. of preprimary children attended nursery schools.

In the Netherlands 98 per cent. of children receive pre-school training. I have not been able to get many details, but the grants come from the central Government, not from local authorities.

In France—I thought it would be interesting to look at some European countries because we are going into the EEC—the numbers are rising steeply. The figure for 1972 is 63,500 whereas in 1949 it was only 36,000. I think the hon. Lady the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East will be interested to know that every commune in France with a population of 2,000 or above is obliged to provide a nursery school. This is known as the Ecole Maternelle. Children go there from the ages of 2 to 6. That was the ancestor, if I may put it in that way, of the nursery school, run by that famous woman Madame Kergounard, who looked upon it as an extended family system. Her headmistress was to be looked upon as the mother of the local community. She formed these schools because she asked what children did between the ages of 2 and 4 when brought up solely in their own homes.

In France, pre-school education is provided for children aged between 2 and 6 either in separate nursery schools or in the infants' departments of primary schools. About 63 per cent. of children between the ages of 2 and 5 go to these schools and compulsory education in France does not begin until the age of 6. On the question of the number of teachers, the only thing that worries me is that the classes are rather too large, the ratio being about 1 to 30, which is rather large for this type of education.

In Belgium, about 95 per cent. of children aged between 3 and 5, and virtually 100 per cent. of those aged between 5 and 6, attend nursery schools. Compulsory attendance at school does not begin until the age of 6. I have some figures which are rather interesting but unfortunately they are for 1965–66. The later UNESCO figures do not distinguish between public and private schools. The number of public nursery schools is 7,164; there are 26,773 teachers and 1,145,366 pupils, giving a ratio of about 1 to 45. In private schools the ratio is about 1 to 29.

Similar accomodation is provided in Germany, but at the moment only about 36 per cent. of the children go to nursery schools. They have few play centres. I could not get figures for nursery schools, but many of them are privately run by the Churches. The number of public kindergartens is 2,971, with 190,425 pupils. The figure of private kindergartens is more than 11,000 with 762,450 pupils. These are run mostly by the Roman Catholics.

In Italy pre-school education is optional and free of charge in State schools for children between 3 and 6, but there are a number of schools run by the Catholics. Perhaps I may give the figures. There are more than 13,000 private nursery schools, with 25,870 teachers and more than 800,000 pupils, giving a ratio of about one to 33. There are more than 6,000 public nursery schools with 13,950 teachers and 478,311 pupils, giving a ratio of one to 34. Just over 50 per cent. of the children go to nursery schools, and that figure is on the increase because the industrial revolution is going on in Italy to a great extent and people from the country districts, particularly in the South, are moving into towns such as Turin where they are able to get jobs.

My right hon. Friend may inquire about the cost of all this. Italy spends 4,300 million lire on this type of education. The figure for Belgium is nearly 7 million francs. France spends more than 4 million francs on this provision. In Germany, it is difficult to find the total amount because it is paid for Lande by Lande, but in the private ones the charge is between £3 and £4 a week. In the Netherlands the figure exceeds 180,000 gilders a year, while in New Zealand the figure for capital costs is £66,000, with a total of more than £500,000. In addition provision is made for playgroups.

I have mentioned those figures because we are going into the Common Market and I thought that probably most of the local points would have been made by the time I spoke. I understand that a conference of Ministers of Education is shortly to be held in Europe to deal particularly with migrant children. I hope that the conference will consider carefully all the factors involved in providing nursery schools and playgroups, especially as these children have a new language to learn.

I would like to pay tribute to what has been achieved by the pre-school playgroup movement. In Devon county over 5,000 children are receiving pre-school education, and I am sure that the hon. Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor) was impressed with the work that is being done there—

indicated assent.

by those who run the 164 play centres in the county. In Plymouth we have over 1,000 children receiving pre-school education. It has been with particular pleasure for me, therefore, that I have been able to take part in this debate.

:I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Dame Joan Vickers) on being the first to raise a germane factor in this situation; namely, the progress that has been made within the existing EEC area in pre-school education. This may well prove to be an important factor in stimulating the British Government to put on the pace.

Hon. Members on both sides who have taken part in this debate accept that the largest part of the capacity to learn is—for most children—determined even before they begin school, and that is before they are 5. Recognition of this basic factor in the nurture of children is comparatively recent, and perhaps that is why successive Governments have been slow to provide the money to develop education between the years of 3 to 5.

The longer established ranges of education have made rapidly increasing de- mands and now take annually nearly £3,000 million, or 6 per cent. of the gross national product. Since the war, several changes of emphasis have been made from secondary to higher and on now to primary education. However, at last it is becoming clearer how much of children's capacity to learn depends on what happens to them between 3 and 5. The time has come for a review of priorities.

Some encouraging progress has recently been made in expanding nursery education. I welcome this, and particularly the additional funds that are now being provided for priority area children. However, I do not believe that to provide nursery education for only 10 per cent. of the 3 to 5 age group is enough in view of what we now know.

In the last four years I have spent much time, as a member of a Select Committee, visiting areas of special educational need in the decaying centres of some of our cities. There, both local and immigrant children are being handicapped by their environment. I have visited, among other places, the area of my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Wilkinson), who earlier in this debate spoke with such sensitivity and impact. In these areas I have seen something of the benefits that nursery schools and playgroups have brought to children, parents and the whole local community.

I welcome the priority that is now being given under the urban programme to pre-school provision and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on her part in expanding it. Nevertheless, I urge her to make further increases in these areas of special need. Now that the needs of pre-school education and the opportunities that it provides are becoming better known it should, because of its own intrinsic merits, be steadily expanded also in other towns and rural areas.

As a parent of four children, each of whom was able to have some pre-school education both in Africa and in England, I have some experience of its benefits. I believe that we should aim at making nursery education available for all. But this will, I accept, take some time. Both financial and administrative problems will impose limitations. But I believe that the point has now been reached where an act of political will must be made.

There will always be conflicting claims on national resources. Education, with popular support, now claims a major and growing slice of the national cake in terms both of money and trained manpower, but the time has come for my right hon. Friend to reach a decision to increase provision for pre-school education. To provide £12 million out of an annual expenditure of nearly £3,000 million for education as a whole is not enough. Educational research, experience of the intrinsic benefits of pre-school education, growing demands from parents and, perhaps, the example of some countries in the EEC now justify such a shift of emphasis and a more rapid expansion.

I well realise that the training of teachers for pre-school education will itself limit the pace of expansion. Among the priorities, therefore, must be increased funds for the training of these teachers. Only last week I received in the House a large deputation of trainee teachers from Surrey, including some from my own constituency, seeking an expansion of training as well as an expansion of the whole range of pre-school education.

As to the steps I should like to see my right hon. Friend taking—and I am glad that at this stage we have a woman and a mother as our Minister—I have nothing to add to the comprehensive proposals put forward with great clarity and cogency and, if I may say so, humanity, by my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison). In spite of what my right hon. Friend has said about parental contribution. I support my hon. Friend's suggestion that those who can afford it should make a contribution to the pre-school education of their own children, especially if this would result in expanding a good service more rapidly than central funds can at present support.

:I was somewhat startled to hear the hon. Lady the Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor) refer to nursery classes in primary schools as though they were in some way inferior to nursery schools themselves. This has certainly not been my experience, and I am glad that my right hon. Friend in her review of future provision of pre-school education did not accept that view.

:I think the hon. Lady must have misunderstood. I was referring not to nursery classes in primary schools but to rising-5s in nursery schools, which is a different category.

:I am glad that the hon. Lady has taken up the point because I was startled to hear what I understood her to say, though when we read HANSARD we may find that the answer she gives on this second occasion is not entirely accurate. Be that as it may, I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in her review of future provision of pre-school education did not accept that point of view. My right hon. Friend made a valid observation when she said that this type of education in primary schools was a much better use of funds because of the high overhead entailed in exclusively nursery schools with their high staff ratios.

I was fortunate, as was my hon. Friend the Member for Dorking (Sir G. Sinclair), in that when my children were young we lived in an area where the village school was under-pupilled and one of my children was able to go there at 3 and another at 4. I watched them and the other children in the village who were able to go early, and throughout their school careers in succeeding years they had the edge on other children not able to go at that early age.

Last week I was going round a school in my constituency which recently had an extension and which, because of a shift in population, has been able to take in children at about 44. The school authorities were glad to be able to do so, because they found that these children were able to go into the second class reasonably fluent readers, thus giving them a tremendous advantage in coming years.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Dorking that in a total expenditure of £2,900 million on education a cut in the proportion of £100 million on capital expenditure and £50 million in current expenditure is not too high a price to pay for expanding this vital service. That is the cost of providing it, but the cost of not providing it is infinitely higher. Remedial work is costly, although superbly done. Those of us who go round the schools week by week have seen the devoted work which goes on to correct and to fill in the gaps for children who have not succeeded in learning to read at an early age, but the work is expensive in time and staff. However, we can never know what scars will remain after the gaps have been filled.

Children often feel inferior when they are behind in many of the subjects to which reading is alone the key, and often they cannot adequately be picked up by remedial training, and so they go on to become not only the semi-illiterates at 11 or 15, about whom we were startled to read in a report two months ago, but the dropouts and drifters and petty criminals, not just for years, but probably for a lifetime.

Those of us whose work takes us into contact with juvenile delinquents and criminals know how often the fact that a boy or girl—usually a boy—cannot read has meant that he has not been settled in a job and has only the miserable dead-end jobs. That has led him into crime or into exhibitionism of even more unpleasant types. The lengths to which a man will go to hide from his wife the fact that he is illiterate is sometimes astonishing. It means that a man cannot get a job even as a lorry driver because he is unable to deal with delivery notes and consignment notes.

Someone on probation or newly out of gaol is difficult to place in a job if he is illiterate. He may be given a crash course in reading in gaol, and there will be more of that in the day centres which will be established by the Criminal Justice Bill. But once a man has a stain on his character it may be too late to start filling in the gaps. I believe that many criminals today would not have been criminals if they had had a decent start in their education 20 years or more ago, and we do not want to repeat that mistake.

Hon. Members opposite have said that we must put much of the emphasis on helping the deprived areas. The hon. Member for Flint, East (Mr. Barry Jones) emphasised that we must give greater help to children from maladjusted families, children with mental handicaps, deprived children, and so on.

I feel terribly strongly that it is a mistake to segregate children from problem homes. They should be mixed with children from good homes from an early age. If there is too big a mix of deprived or immigrant or any other type of child, then all the children are damaged. They must learn to mix from an early age, and they must have the benefit of experience of the other children, good or bad. They will have to learn to mix with them later, and it is most important that they start as they mean to go on.

I beg the Minister to use her charm and persuasiveness to get more money out of the Treasury to expedite this programme, which in the end will save money for the taxpayer.

:I am glad to be able to take part in this debate, and I congratulate those who chose these Motions and gave us the opportunity for it.

I have the deepest sense of gratitude for the great advantages that my children have had and are having at a nursery school provided by the GLC not more than half a mile away from here. Many have spoken making clear their understanding of the advantages which come to a child who has had this chance. As one sees them coming home day by day from such a school, it is worth remembering the advantages, which are obvious. There is the chance to learn how to co-operate with other small children, which, if they are alone at home, is often difficult to learn. There is the chance to play constructively and to learn how to use pen and pencil. There is the independence from home, from mother, the facility for the language and for meeting the endless questioning which comes from young children.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison) who said that nursery school education is not an educational panacea. It is an advantage but not a solution to all our educational problems. I would disagree with him about some of the figures he gave. If it can be shown that children are clearly advantaged at the age of 8 through such pre-school provision I would view with some suspicion statistics which show that they trail off thereafter.

However, it is not just the educational advantage that we are discussing. It is the social advantages that come to the child which give him the chance to cope with an environment becoming steadily more difficult. We have been talking about the deprived child, but it is worth remembering the infinite advantages that the child who is not deprived can gain from a nursery school. We have heard of the children brought up in high blocks of flats and we have discussed the almost overwhelming influence of television, I am sure to no great advantage. It is not only the children from those typical homes; it is often the surburban children, recognised as suffering from the" au pair" syndrome. This is a poor child of three or four trying to cope with the English language who has been left with a girl of perhaps no more than 19 or 20 from abroad whose capacity to speak English is entirely limited.

Every Government has recognised the need and has found difficulty in satisfying it. How little we have managed to do. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury gave some figures about the number of children who had the advantage of various forms of nursery education or help. I am sure the Treasury Bench would pounce upon the figures if they were right because they were very optimistic. It is probable that there are not more than 100,000 children between the ages of 3 and 5 who have the advantage of going to nursery schools for half of each day for six terms.

It is easy to say that expenditure on many other aspects of education should be applied to nursery education. One can think of a number of projects started by other Governments and perhaps continued by the present Government in which national prestige probably had a great deal to do with the decision to incur the expenditure. It is all a question of priorities. It is perhaps hard to say this to the present Secretary of State because it is generally recognised that she did an excellent job, particularly in the early months of office, in ensuring that her Department had high priority and she managed to preserve within her ambience almost all she needed to meet her programme.

But it is slightly artificial to discuss this matter simply in terms of what is now available to the Department. We must consider the whole of Government expenditure. When that test of priority is applied, I should have thought that it would be possible to find in the broad spectrum areas from which a certain amount of money could be taken for a steady but purposeful attempt to introduce nursery education. I ask the Government to make a start in that direction. We shall not get the whole loaf, or even half a loaf now, but we can make a start, and it should be a purposeful start. Having made that choice, we must then decide how and where to apply the money. I am optimistic about the Government making this decision. It is surprising how quickly people change their minds. We have only to consider how we have changed our minds over the last two years to be optimistic about further changes.

What should our priorities be once we have made that decision? The approach must be broad. We shall, of course, continue to encourage playgroups and the special groups helping immigrants, but the main drive should be to concentrate on providing genuine nursery school education by which a child will have the chance of attending a nursery school for half of each day over six terms. This can be done only by the State and, largely, the local authorities. There are private schools which are doing a good job. Some of them are excellent, some of them are far from excellent.

I was pleased to hear my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State firmly repudiate any possibility of fee-paying. Apart from the powerful objections which she raised, once we introduce fee-paying we are likely to exclude the families whose children should be sent to nursery schools. It is not necessarily a question of families which could not afford to pay the fees. There are families who would find it easier to pay more for the colour television. There would also be great difficulty in raising an adequate amount of money through fee-paying.

So one ought to concentrate on what I would describe as the genuine nursery school, and this should be distinguished from child minding in all its forms. It is a different and separate requirement. The all-day nursery is absolutely vital, absolutely necessary, but it is really to the advantage of the mother. The half-day school is for the advantage of the child. We have to keep clear the distinction between them. The half-day school may remove from the mother altogether the possibility of going to work, because the child has to be taken to the school at 9.30 a.m. and collected again at lunch time. Far from helping people to take second jobs, the half-day school may be the very reason why they cannot.

If we are to do this, how should we make our advance? I believe we have to get rid of Circular No. 8/60. I cannot see how we can continue with that position. I accept—it must be accepted —that we cannot just open the floodgates, and the Secretary of State may have to say that we need some regulation at the moment, on the lines of Circular 8/60, but eventually we shall have to have other provisions to take its place. May be we shall want to concentrate on deprived areas. It might well be one would not want to remove all control, but the blanket control provided by Circular 8/60 has to go.

We are right, I think, to concentrate on priority areas. Again, I am not going at length into this because several hon. Members have mentioned it, but I think that to build new estates without building into them provision for nursery schools is scandalous, when we know that inevitably those schools will come.

I would encourage very much the attachment to primary schools of accommodation for nursery teaching, and I do so for a reason which has not been advanced here so far today, and for a reason apart from the obvious economic advantages. One of the great difficulties in a family of two children, if one is 7 or 8 and another is between 3 and 5, is getting them to and from school. How is mum without a car to take them and fetch them? It does not necessarily happen that she can make arrangements with a neighbour to take them on Monday and in return take the neighbour's children on Tuesday. There are some mothers in those favourable circumstances, but for many, indeed most, families this is not a reality: mother has to take the child herself. Therefore the very fact of having nursery education and primary education running together would mean enabling many more families to take advantage of both.

I do not want to take too long, so I shall conclude, but I must say that I was surprised, and somewhat encouraged, by the low figure, £100 million, of capital cost which my right hon. Friend produced of how much we would need to expend to provide a near-universal nursery school system. I had been under the sad illusion that that figure would be nearer £150 million. Indeed, the way costs are going that might yet be nearer the truth. The annual cost of running it is, I think it is generally accepted, about £50 million. These are formidable sums. It would be wrong simply to take those sums and disregard the countervailing advantages. No one is suggesting that we shall arrive at this level of expenditure immediately, or even within the next few years. For the moment the figures would be much lower, but even if we had to face the full cost we must remember how much we should save in remedial classes, in vandalism and in the borstals, which are already too full.

As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, there has been a remarkable consensus of opinion about the importance of nursery education, and we have all agreed that it is a matter of priorities. If we are to do something about it the money must come from somewhere. I ask my right hon. Friend to look—as I am sure she does—at the question of priorities. Perhaps in the future when we know more about education and children we may find that nursery education is far more important than we now think. Specialists, psychologists and educationists are saying that the years between 3 and 5 are perhaps the most important in a child's life. If that is true, we should change our priorities and do something constructive about nursery education.

Some research work on children between the ages of 3 and 5 was done a few years ago by the old LCC Child Guidance Clinic. The conclusion which was reached was that most of the mental disorders in adolescent and immediately pre-adolescent children stemmed from the pre-school years. What happens to children in the years between 3 and 5 has a profound and tragic effect upon them 5, 10 or 15 years later.

The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations conducted a series of interviews with headmistresses of infant schools and asked them over a period on a continuing basis to compare the performance of children who had had some pre-school provision and children who had had none. Again, the result was what we would expect.

A third and slightly more human illustration has been vouched to me. A welfare officer encountered a 5-year-old child of average intelligence who was unable to speak. It was discovered that the child lived with its mother who was too busy to talk to it. Naturally, if no one speaks to the child, the child is unable to speak. It is a matter of language and of human companionship and human relationships.

If the years between 3 and 5 are of such fundamental importance in the development of the child, the adolescent and eventually the adult, that importance is increased by the social changes which are now taking place. We have urban growth and high rise development, which I detest. Awful things happen to children between 3 and 5 years old who are stuck in high rise flats. We are moving towards smaller families, families with a single child, two or three children. Families 40 years ago consisted of five or six children and the grandmother and perhaps an aunt lived in the house. This does not happen today, with the result that the child is more isolated, especially when the mother has to go out to work.

A special characteristic in my part of London is the large number of immigrant families. All these children are special cases, apart from those who live in deprived areas and come from underprivileged homes.

Since we first started thinking in educational terms—50 years ago or whenever it was—we may have underestimated the importance of the years between 3 and 5 on the development of the child. The type of society in which we are living makes it more difficult for the young child to have the sort of companionship and education that it needs, unless the State helps the mother. I ask my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary whether it is not possible for further research to be carried out in respect of these formative years in a child's life. If they show what I believe they will show, a change in priorities should be made.

This is an extremely important debate. We may have sharply differing attitudes across the Chamber, but the House is often at its best when it turns its attention to matters as socially important as pre-school education.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short) referred to a problem that is of particular importance in the City of Manchester. Many nursery nurses in that city are doing the work of nursery school teachers without receiving the rate for the job. Those to whom I refer have been trained by the Nursery Nurses Education Board and are doing a very fine job. I trust that the Secretary of State will look urgently and sympathetically at the representations that have been made in the debate on their behalf.

The Secretary of State will know that the Manchester City Council is extremely anxious to increase nursery school provision in the city. Following an approach made to me by the Town Clerk of Manchester, I made written representations to the Secretary of State. I have now received a reply from Lord Belstead, but I do not think that the matter should rest on the basis of that reply and I hope that the Secretary of State will re-examine the urgent representations that have been made by the Manchester City Council for an improvement in nursery school provision.

Right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House have received deputations from those who are especially concerned to improve nursery school education and, in particular, to extend the provision of such education. The teachers who came to see me made a compelling case. I know that the drive to improve nursery school provision will have been given a new impetus by this debate.

The House will know that there is a sad lack of pre-school educational facilities for handicapped children. In my view such children should as far as possible be provided for in nursery schools for normal children. I am sure that anyone familiar with our education system will agree that the earlier a child arrives at school the more quickly we identify handicaps which have been unidentified in the home.

My wife teaches a reception class and sees children when they arrive for the very first time at school. Few of them are fortunate enough to have been at nursery school before entering infants school. It is only when children are at school that we can begin to discover disabilities which can have an important effect on their educational progress. It will be appreciated that in the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, 1970. reference was made to the problems of autistic children. I feel that improvement of nursery school provision will help more quickly to identify those children who suffer from autism and dyslexia.

I did not intend to address the House at length, and I conclude by saying that I hope the problems of handicapped children will be taken fully into account by the Department in the very careful review which it will want to give to all that has been said in this debate.

:I know that the hon. Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Alfred Morris) will forgive me for not taking up the points in his speech, because I intend to concentrate on two or three points of my own which I regard as important in this context. Having been out of the Chamber a little earlier, I missed the speech of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science and I hope that the points I shall now put were not covered in her remarks.

It is rare to have had such unanimity in the House as we have had today, though this occasionally happens on Fridays when a group of people, who perhaps may be referred to as a pressure group, find themselves gathered together because of their common interest in a subject. We can can only hope that this unanimity reflects itself in the consciousness of the Government and the Ministers responsible for policy on this topic.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dorking (Sir G. Sinclair) ignored the fact that only one child in 10 gets the benefit of pre-school educational experience. From the Government's point of view the picture is even worse because only half of those children are in nursery school places provided by the Government. The other half are in the important area of pre-school provision embodied in the Preschool Playgroup Association and similar bodies in terms of voluntary effort in which parents are involved in running schemes. Superficially it might be said that the pre-school movement is a middle-class organisation and that nursery provision, because it has been largely under the auspices of the urban aid scheme, is concentrated in educational priority areas.

It can be said that the effort is directed at those most in need, but I question whether this is the case. The fact that there is such pressure on nursery school places means almost inevitably that there is a waiting list for available places. The parents who have the knowledge, wit and initiative to apply for these nursery school places are not likely to be the parents of those who most need nursery education. Administratively we need to look at this matter and see whether the money we are spending on the provision of nursery school places in EPAs is going to those children who most need it.

There is a reactionary viewpoint, which I doubt has been expressed today, that children should not be in pre-school education before the age of 5 but should be with their mothers. One probably does not have to meet that point. Suffice it to say that in my constituency that is not the alternative. The alternative is all too often the childminder. I acknowledge that Governments have made some attempts to register childminders and get some order into this matter. But often, when one knocks on doors in Paddington, one meets children, many to a room, who have no facilities, no toys or anything else. It is small wonder that when they get to primary school they are unable to take proper advantage of primary education.

I turn now to the non-governmental area of pre-school activity. There are about 10,000 playgroups, almost all of which were started as voluntary groups on budgets of less than £100 raised by voluntary contributions locally and susstained by the voluntary efforts of the parents involved. The success of this effort is a lesson which runs beyond the pre-school education sector in involving parents and the community in the education of children. All over the country in institutes of further education courses are now run for the parents and organisers of these groups.

London is particularly fortunate. The Inner London Education Authority has been sufficiently far-sighted to provide money for the administration of preschool schemes. The Borough of Westminster, my own authority, has been particularly generous in virtually guaranteeing that in all cases where a deficit arises from running a pre-school playgroup, it will be met by the local authority concerned. With this support from the local authorities, it is small wonder that the pre-school movement has flourished as it has.

Finally—I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge (Mr. Hornby) wants to contribute to the debate—the main criticism levelled at the voluntary system is the variety of standard that sometimes emerges in the early stages. I hope that the training, about which I have just spoken and on which I should have liked to expand if I had more time, will help to even this out. We may have a situation where many of the experiments and initiatives taken on the voluntary side of pre-school education may he of value to us as in time we find more resources to develop properly State-provided education for the under-5s.

:I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington, South (Mr. Scott) for cutting short his remarks. At the tail end of this debate there is little new to be said, so I propose, as it were, to make three or four brief points in shorthand.

First, I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will not in any sense under-estimate the strength of public opinion which feels that there is social and education work to be done in this sphere. I emphasise the social aspect be-because in many new communities the children make many more friends for their parents than their parents make for themselves. That is an impotant factor in bringing new communities together.

Secondly, I hope that my hon. Friend will look again at Circular 8/60. That circular was bred of a shortage of teachers to a degree that does not exist now. There is room for relaxation in that matter.

Thirdly, the money supply is still short in this as in many other spheres, but my hon. Friend can still relax that circular and give a degree of time to local education authorities to see what they want to do most.

Next, I hope he will not move in this matter at the expense of what he and his right hon. Friend are already doing in the primary school sector. My view is that that is still and should remain the top priority. There is more work to be done in this sector.

If the supply of teachers is no longer quite as short as it was, there is no reason to impose new artificial shortages by making the extent of qualifications artificially rigorous at the behest of the NUT. There is plenty of room for assistance in this sector, voluntary and not fully qualified, under the direction of fully qualified persons as the Plowden Report suggested.

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I am sure that I speak for all right hon. and hon. Members when I say how much I regret the news of the death of the father of my hon. Friend the Member for Chigwell (Mr. Biggs-Davison), which caused him to withdraw the Adjournment debate that had been planned for today.

I do not propose to be long because the afternoon is drawing on and the sun is shining outside, but I am grateful for the chance of asking the Under-Secretary one or two questions about the current situation as it affects box girder bridges.

For about 15 years, in this country box girder bridges have been regarded as a triumph of bridge-building. They were always believed to have many advantages. Up to 500 ft. in span they need no support, and they can be made longer with the use of stays. They are lighter than other types of bridge. They look nicer, as those who have seen them will agree. Their construction allows them to be shallower, which makes for better clearance more simply. They use less steel, and they require less foundation work. All in all, it was generally agreed that they were paragons of bridges, and it is not surprising that today there are about 51 bridges in England and many abroad.

Then, as the House knows, a year ago disaster struck, and, indeed, it was a disaster. At Milford Haven in Wales a bridge under construction collapsed, and four people were killed. In the autumn of 1970, a bridge over the River Yarra, also under construction, collapsed, and 30 people were killed. I am told that at Coblenz in Germany a bridge collapsed last year. I understand that those three bridges were in the course of construction. No box girder bridge has collapsed once it has been completed. Many doubts were raised about the method of construction of at least one of those bridges, to such an extent that a Royal Commission in Australia is considering this matter.

As a result of those tragic events the Secretary of State appointed the Merrison Committee in December, 1970, to look at and report on the whole question of the construction of this type of bridge in this country. As I have said, there are 51 of them here. They contribute materially to transport communications and are, therefore, of profound importance to our economy.

Professor Merrison, of Bristol University, has already given an interim report which, as the House knows, recommended strengthening these bridges and imposing weight restrictions. I am told that many were strengthened. Can my hon. Friend tell the House when the full and final report of the Merrison Committee will be to hand. At the same time, can he comment on the new safety rules which may be introduced, or have been introduced, or which he proposes to introduce as a result of the report and interim report? What progress is being made with the safety checks recommended by the interim report?

Since the subject of this Adjournment debate was made known, at least two hon. Members have approached me and raised specific points. I do not know whether my hon. Friend will have the answers to hand. Considerable concern is still being felt because the 5-mile Birmingham link of the M6 is still not in use. It was supposed to have been opened last November, but there is now talk of it opening towards the end of May. Anyone who knows the Birmingham area will realise the tremendous inconvenience which this is causing to so many people who find it tantalising to see this great new construction but be unable to use it.

What was regarded as one of the showpieces of civil engineering in this country, the great Tinsley viaduct, three miles in length, on the MI, has severe restrictions on it. Work is still in progress, but there are rumours that the work may take as long as two years to complete. It is to be hoped that these rumours have no foundation, and any information that the Minister can give will be welcome.

Apart from the tragic collapse of the three bridges under construction to which I have referred, and apart from the safety checks which are being carried out and which are causing a certain amount of dislocation in various parts of the country, there are other aspects of concern regarding this type of bridge construction. I shall mention only two.

First, if these bridges have to be strengthened in accordance with recommendations that Merrison may recommend, this will, of course, imply using a greater amount of steel. One must, therefore, ask whether, from the price point of view, these bridges will be less competitive compared with other types of bridge-making. In other words, are the restrictions likely to price the box girder bridge out of the market?

Even if that should happen in this country, things could be extremely difficult for us overseas in terms of bridge building. Britain has been one of the pioneers in bridge construction in various parts of the world. If our architects, engineers and bridge-builders must follow the recommendations which Merrison may produce while their counterparts in other countries do not, we may find ourselves at a considerable competitive disadvantage abroad. I hope that the Minister can comment on this aspect, too.

Second, a topical matter of concern is the apparent discovery of fungus growing on some of these bridges; the fungus has a long and unpronounceable name. It seems that the fungus has been found on the Tinsley viaduct bridge and also on the Alton expressway. I gather that it could cause several difficulties, one due to the fact that it is poisonous in that if it is inhaled it can create bronchial problems. This means that people working on these bridges—people are working on them, by their nature, virtually the whole time—may suffer health consequences because of this fungus.

I am led to understand that the fungus grows principally in damp surroundings. The conclusion may be drawn, therefore, that these bridges are damp. After all, they are built in the concept of an enclosed space, which means that there might be problems of corrosion. Have these problems been overlooked?

I said that this fungus had been" apparently discovered" because there seems to he some conflict about this. Three recent headlines in newspapers raised questions on this issue. First, The Guardian of 5th May carried the headline:

" Fungus threat to bridge workers."

There followed this headline in Construction News for May:

" Birmingham denies box girder fungus."

The most ominous headline of all—indeed, this headline was followed by an article which was extremely, and perhaps unnecessarily, uncomplimentary to box girder bridges—appeared in the Sunday Tunes of 7th May and merely declared:

" End of the road for M-way bridges."

There was not even a question mark after it. Is this indeed the end of the road for M-way bridges?

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham (Mr. William Shelton) for raising this important subject, and I associate myself with the sympathy expressed to my hon. Friend the Member for Chigwell (Mr. Biggs-Davison) on his sudden bereavement.

My hon. Friend started by giving the historical background, but we can go even further back than 15 or 16 years because the Conway and the Britannia bridges, which are some 120 years old, are excellent Victorian examples of the box girder bridge. Box girder bridges have been used increasingly in recent years because they have a number of advantages over their traditional rival, the plate girder bridge. They use less steel, they need less solid and expensive foundations and they are shallower in profile. My hon. Friend listed some of their advantages. Unfortunately, he is quite right in saying that in 1970 there were two disasters, when box girder bridges under construction—I emphasise the fact that they were under construction—collapsed and a number of people lost their lives as a result.

Following the Yarra bridge disaster in Melbourne. my right hon. Friend as a matter of urgency set up an expert committee under Dr. Merrison of Bristol University to look into the whole question. The committee started work in December, 1970, and made an interim report to my right hon. Friend on 2nd July, 1971. This report contained rules for the reappraisal of existing bridges and designs, and I stress that these are for appraisal with a view, to deciding whether it may or may not be necessary to strengthen a bridge. The committee did not advocate strengthening bridges in every case but set up criteria by which existing bridges had to be reappraised. Since the rules were published nearly a year ago they have been amended and improved.

The Committee is now preparing design rules, and in answer to my hon. Friend I can tell him that it expects to report to my right hon. Friend within two months. We have then to provide for the publication of design rules. These design rules should not be as complex as the appraisal rules. They will apply to designs for future bridges and, I understand, will be comparable with design rules for other types of bridge. There has been some criticism by engineers and others that the appraisal rules were extremely complex, but I do not think that the new design rules for future construction will be anything like as complex.

When my right hon. Friend saw the interim report in the summer of last year, restrictions were immediately imposed on all the existing box girder bridges by closing one lane on each carriageway. Thus if a carriageway had three lanes it was reduced to two, and if it had two lanes it was reduced to one. Also, the Department immediately assembled resources to set up more than 50 design offices, using consultants, road construction units and local authority staffs. Here I should pay tribute to the excellent work these design officers have carried out in doing an extremely hard and complex job, starting from scratch and working to a very tight timetable. I have seen very little public commendation of their work and I want now to pay this tribute to them for the very hard and excellent work which they have done and are still doing to bring a speedy conclusion to the problem.

The designs of the 51 box girder bridges to which my hon. Friend referred were reappraised by these teams. This work is going ahead and is in itself no mean achievement. Proposals for strengthening, if required, are formulated by the design teams and submitted to the Department. This is followed by the issue of a certificate of compliance which says that if the strengthening is done the bridge will be safe. There is an additional check on the strengthened design by—and this is important —an independent team, so that all bridges are double checked by two completely independent design teams before there is any removal of restrictions or remedial action is undertaken.

Assuming that the strengthening has to be carried out—and, of course, there are a number of box girder bridges where, on the reappraisal rules, it was found not to be necessary—the next step is agreement on the work to be done between the engineers and the contractors. At a very early stage in this saga, in order to save time and unnecessary delay, a basis for these contracts was negotiated between my Department and the British Constructional Steelwork Association, and this helped greatly to speed up the contract stage so that we have not had to start from scratch with each individual contract. Further double checks are made before the bridge is cleared and the traffic restrictions are removed, and that is an added safeguard to the public. That is the procedure.

My hon. Friend mentioned that strengthening would involve extra steelwork and he said that that must therefore add to the expense. It is difficult to be too precise about this, but in the majority of instances where strengthening has had to be carried out so far the additional steel content has been increased by only about 2 per cent. Some of the rather wilder accusations that may have been bandied about concerning greatly increased costs are, therefore, not strictly accurate. An increase in the steel content of 2 per cent. only should not in any way price this type of construction out of the market in this country or out of world markets.

As my hon. Friend has said, there were 51 steel box girder bridges in use when the restrictions were imposed a year ago. It may be helpful if I give the House the estimate—and I stress that it is an estimate—of when the restrictions may be removed from the 24 box girder bridges which are still subject to appraisal or strengthening, or upon which work is still being carried out.

I first refer to the Midland motorway link, the M6. As my hon. Friend said, considerable work has rightly had to be done on this road. It is an important national link, particularly important for my constituency as much of the traffic which cannot use the intermediate sections now spills off into my constituency. The link is to be opened by my right hon. Friend on 24th May, when I hope to have the pleasure of being with him. It will be a vital national artery.

We estimate that restrictions should be lifted by the middle of this year on the following bridges: on the M5, the Oldbury, West Bromwich and Bescott sections of the Midland link; on the M6, the Fylde viaduct in Lancashire; over the A40(M), the Parton Road and Ph-ton Lane bridges in Gloucestershire. We hope that by the autumn of 1972 restrictions will be lifted from the Haslingden slip road bridge on the A681 in Lancashire and the Red Lane Dyke bridge over the M62 in the West Riding of Yorkshire. We hope that by the end of 1972 restrictions will have been lifted from the Bury new road bridge on the M62 in Lancashire, Wardley Moss on the M61 in Lancashire, and the Wardley Grange bridge on the M61 in Lancashire, the Clump bridge on the M61 in Lancashire; the Lumley Dene bridge on the A1(M) in Durham, the Sandhole Loop bridge and Wardley Hall Loop bridge on the M62 in Lancashire, and the Coombe Lane bridge on the A238 in Surrey.

By the spring of next year, we hope, restrictions will have been removed from the Aust viaduct and the Wye bridge and viaduct on the M4 in Gloucestershire and the Bredon bridges on the M5 on the Gloucestershire-Worcestershire border. By the middle of next year, we hope, restrictions will have been removed from the Adur bridge on the A27 in West Sussex, and we hope that by the autumn of 1973 restrictions will have been lifted from the Tinsley viaduct on the M1 in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a bridge which my hon. Friend specifically mentioned and which concerns a number of hon. Members from the Sheffield area. The delay will not be quite as long as my hon. Friend feared.

There are still three local authority bridges under restriction over the Aston Expressway on the A38 in Birmingham, the Scotswood bridge on the Durham-Newcastle border and the Mersey tunnel approaches at Birkenhead. As these are the responsibility of the local authorities concerned, I am not able to give any date for the lifting of the restrictions.

My hon. Friend mentioned the question of fungus. Much has been said about this and there have been a number of reports about fungus in box girder bridges some of which have been misleading. I welcome this opportunity to put the facts on the record. Every bridge has been examined inside and out. The fungus which my hon. Friend could not pronounce and at which I will have a go is Aspergillus fumigatus. It has been found only in Tinsley viaduct and steps are being taken to remove it and prevent a recurrence. Because it presented a health hazard to maintenance personnel a general warning was issued to maintaining authorities, since when small patches of fungus have been found only in two other box girders. One of them is harmless and is, I understand, of the penicillin family. The other is still being analysed. Many varieties of fungus spores are airborne and may find their way into enclosed spaces where they could thrive if conditions are favourable. Only Aspergillus fumigatus is known to be a health hazard and the only place where we have so far found it is in the Tinsley viaduct.

We shall re-examine all the bridges and we intend that fungus will be added to the list of defects to be looked for at annual inspections. Fungus has not been discovered in the Gravelly Hill interchange box girders. However, following the strengthening operations there inside the boxes it was necessary to repaint, and because the fungus had previously been found in Tinsley viaduct it was obviously sensible when repainting to use a non-linseed oil-based paint to deny nutriment to the fungus. I understand that Aspergillus fumigatus is particularly fond of linseed oil, so it was obviously sensible if one was to repaint the bridge to deny the fungus its staple diet.

It is not intended to repaint the inside of box girders as a precautionary measure but where they are repainted for other reasons, as they had to be in the Gravelly Hill box girders, clearly the paint system will be selected to reduce the risk of fungal growth. This is a sensible precaution. The problem of fungus in box girder bridges is more of a nuisance than cause for concern. It presents no special corrosion hazard and is not a factor to be considered in any decision to continue the steel box girder form of construction. I hope that this puts the whole fungus problem in perspective and that the record is now straight.

I do not regard box girder bridges as a dying breed and we have confidence in them. My hon. Friend raised the possibilities of British firms building bridges abroad and perhaps, because they will be following the new Merrison rules, being disadvantaged compared with foreign competitors. This is always a risk. A total of 104 copies of the interim Merrison rules have been sent to Government Departments and experts in a number of different countries. We now have more knowledge about this problem than probably anyone else. The promptness and firmness of my Department in setting up the Merrison Committee and the actions that my right hon. Friend has taken and the double-checking of all the bridges show that we have lost no time in learning the lessons to be drawn from the tragic accidents of 1970.

This in itself must help our bridge builders when they tender for contracts abroad. I would be very surprised, in view of all the publicity there has been and all the expertise that we have now assembled over the past two years, if the rules that we have established and the lessons we have learned are not applied to new constructions of box girders in other parts of the world. I see no reason why we should be particularly disadvantaged.

It is a remarkable tribute to British engineering skill and enterprise that the remedial action that has been and is being taken, and which is inevitably complex, is being carried out so quickly and thoroughly. We have every confidence in British bridge builders and British engineering standards. The lessons we have learned over the past two years will be of immense value not only to motorists and travellers in this country but to highway engineers throughout the world.

I welcome the chance my hon. Friend has given me to put these facts on record and to answer his questions. My Department has every confidence in British bridge builders, and I see no reason at all why they should not be confident of their future.