In this afternoon’s Q&A from the Conference hall, Nick Clegg tackled questions from the floor with a relaxed and confident manner that bodes well for the upcoming TV Leaders’ Debates.

He took questions from party members in the hall, before taking supplementaries.

First up was education and whether schools should use the Pupil Premium to reduce class sizes. Nick said that the Pupil Premium seeks to give back trust to teachers and headteachers. Smaller class sizes are important for instilling a sense of self-confidence and willingness to learn, especially in the early years. The Pupil Premium allows us to do that, but doesn’t prescribe it. Teachers and headteachers are free to use the Pupil Premium in other ways.

Nick said “It’s easier to teach larger classes where the parents are supportive and engaged at home. It’s harder for children from homes where parents aren’t able to give that sort of support,” and pointed to the strong relationship between social deprivation and poor educational performance. Nick suggested the money could be used for one-to-one tuition and catch-up classes. Nick’s visits to Sweden have shown him that this would help all children, not just the deprived ones, as children who learn well learn better all together.

On Ofsted: “I want to see the wings of Ofsted clipped – it’s become far too sprawling.”

On tax
A friendly question from James Graham helped Nick to clarify the position on tax:

Nick spoke about the 10% levy on the profits of banks. All the other proposals for raising money for measures such as the Pupil Premium are cuts and savings in current government spending.

Mansion Tax is part of a package of revenue raising measures which will fund the raising of the income tax threshold to £10,000. This is “a tax-neutral redistributive tax switch, a stand-alone tax package.”

The rest will come from savings we’ve identified. Two thirds will be spent on the deficit, the rest on specific spending commitments we’ve identified as necessary. Revenue saving (as opposed to revenue raising) measures include stopping ID cards and capping public sector pay increases.

On Afghanistan
Nick was challenged over the party’s approach to Afghanistan – is there a running discontent within the party about the handling of the war there? Nick said that it’s not as easy to justify a presence there as it was eight years ago, and that his visit to troops in Helmand confirmed this. He felt we were going backwards in Afghanistan in terms of strategy and equipment because the war in Iraq had diverted attention and resources from Afghanistan.

However, he said that there is no military solution, and yet there is no non-military strategy to accompany the military strategy either. He said that we should come to a conclusion about Afghanistan quickly after the General Election, and certainly within the next Parliament. The question for the wider party is likely to be asked more frequently: should we be pulling out of Afghanistan altogether?

On his implied support of Thatcher in his Spectator interview
“What I said was this: I left university in the mid-eighties at the height of the Thatcher revolution. I now represent Sheffield, which was devastated by her policies.” Nick says that he’s a great supporter of trades unions but know that people don’t want to return to the days of vested interests being too important, too cosseted – challenging vested interests is at the heart of Liberalism. The difference now is that banks are the new vested interests: “That’s why I call the bankers Scargill in pinstripes! What makes our party great is that we’ve never been beholden to vested interests.”

Should the criminal age be raised from 10 to 12?
By linking the raising of the criminal age to the murder of James Bulger, Nick said that the Children’s Commisioner’s comments this week did nothing to help illuminate the important discussion. As a society we criminalise children on an industrial scale, which should be a source of national shame. We spend around ten times as much money as we do on preventing them committing crime in the first place. We barely hear about the fact that 3000 or 4000 young men go into prison every month. And they’re now reoffending on a massive scale. The government has created “colleges of crime”. It’s in that context that we need to be tough.

“Who are [the Tories] to declare we’re Broken Britain? How patronising, how pessimistic, how arrogant! Of course there are pockets of deprivation, but don’t insult the decency and dignity of people in those communities by saying they’re broken. I basically believe people are good. I’m not being naive about this, there’s always been evil in human affairs, but don’t talk this country down.”

Nigel Farage: merely an entertaining sideshow or actually quite dangerous?
Nick described Farage as “self evidently a colourful but preposterous figure” and refuted the idea that there are no differences between political parties. Far from taking away sovereignty, the EU allows us to gain more control over forces we couldn’t hope to influence as a country on our own, such as climate change and international paedophile rings. At least UKIP have the honesty to tell people they want to pull out of the EU – the Tories can’t quite bring themselves to say what they really think.