Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 75)
MONDAY 10 MARCH 2003
PROFESSOR JOHN
BYNNER, PROFESSOR
SALLY TOMLINSON
AND DR
EMMA SMITH
60. Is that the consensus about the school effects,
somewhere between 10% and 20%.
(Professor Bynner) In the book Inequality by
Christopher Jencksit it said that schools do not matter at all
once you really take account of families. The strength of the
Primary School Project by Peter Mortimer and Co. was exactly to
show that that is wrong, there is a way of making schools more
effective—strong leadership, structure, a key role for deputy
heads, all that sort of stuff shows up in that study, it is not
going to turn the world round totally but it is going to benefit
a few children and overall that will improve the school as a whole.
If everyone is working together in achieving then there is a kind
of multiplier that everyone is going to benefit from.
61. Following that and linking that with what
you said about league tables, is there an argument for league
tables not with raw scores but published with value added scores?
(Professor Bynner) Value added are much better, that
is a huge improvement.
62. Would that show the schools in similar circumstances
who were making the full 20% difference?
(Professor Tomlinson) There are even problems over
value added because often, particularly in the urban areas, you
start out with one cohort of children and there is so much movement
in between schools that you never end up with the same cohort
of children in the end, so factors like that get in the way of
value added, although I agree with John the value added approach
is much better. That can also show grammar schools that are not
doing very well, where you know they have middle-class children.
Paul Holmes
63. You have already talked in various ways
about Excellence in Cities and Sure Start, both schemes are very
good but the limitation is, it seems to a lot of people, Sure
Start concentrates on the wards with the highest concentration
of deprivation, Excellence in Cities concentrates on cities, apart
from a few limited experiments, like the one in Chesterfield which
has started. What other mechanism would you use to get this extra
money and extra support to the children who need it, who are not
concentrated in certain wards or in inner cities? For example
they have a postcode premium for universities in Holland that
give 50% more money to children who come from deprived areas,
the money follows the pupil, it does not go into concentrated
schools.
(Professor Bynner) Sure Start in Britain
was bid for by partnership. There were 500 partnerships which
were a mixture of local people and local authorities. In Scotland
it was distributed through local authorities and therefore in
one sense you are letting an existing system distribute funds
where they seem to be needed, and that completely covers in effect
the whole country. That is another mechanism. We seem to have
forgotten Local Education Authorities are the means of delivering
services to people in this respect. It is a debate to be had.
(Professor Tomlinson) One of the best things about
Sure Start was it was not a competitive bidding process, as long
as you could demonstrate you were doing a whole set of certain
things then you got the money, did you not? Whereas a lot of the
other interventions that we have depend on competitive bidding.
I agree with John, we have forgotten about local authorities,
I am a great fan of them. I do think it would be a good idea to
ask them where the pockets of deprivation are. I currently live
in Worcestershire and Worcestershire LEA knows where the deprivation
is and this would be the mechanism for distributing it.
64. How far would the cynic say—not that
I am a cynic of course—that Excellence in Cities and Sure
Start is a way of, yes, you are giving more real money but there
is a limited policy nationally and that is a way of rationing
it. The Sure Start in Chesterfield that is just beginning is only
going to three particular wards out of 19, and yet lots of the
other wards have big areas of deprivation it is just not quite
as concentrated. How far is it a rationing method for money or
how far is it that it has not been thought through as a way of
getting it to the areas that need it?
(Professor Tomlinson) It has always been a problem
trying to locate your pockets of deprivation so that you can target
the money on them. I remember in the 1970s in Birmingham they
used to take big sheets of plastic and colour in where there were
free school meals, where there was English as a second language
and superimpose them and then put a ring round the darkest areas
and give the money to those. There are various ways of finding
out where deprivation is. I think we have gone too far with this
selective competitive bidding culture and it would be much better
to give larger amounts of money to many more areas and to rely
on people in the local authority to distribute it.
Chairman
65. There is not an inexhaustible supply of
money.
(Professor Tomlinson) There are several
answers to that. My anecdotal view is we are a rich country and
we do not spend enough on education and training.
Paul Holmes
66. One more specific question for Professor
Tomlinson, although the others may want to chip in as well, in
your opening comments you were quite optimistic about the fact
that there is a lot of good educational research starting to appear
and in the future government policy will be based on research.
The evidence we have taken so far on specialist schools, for example,
and what we are already hearing is government policy is not based
on educational research. Do you have any indication that it is
going to be in the future that made you so optimistic at the start?
(Professor Tomlinson) No, not at all,
I am just an optimist. We have heard that, yes, policy will be
based on evidence, although there is a joke in academia, policy
based evidence. It is quite the reverse, we do not think that
policy is based on evidence.
Chairman
67. Perhaps we do not get the quality research
to base policy on.
(Professor Tomlinson) It is nothing new,
governments take research that seems to fit their policy some
times, do they not? This has always been done. In academia we
would like to see it the other way round. Okay, maybe we have
our prejudices, and so on, as well.
Paul Holmes
68. The new Secretary of State who you are seeing
after this meeting has not said, "Please come in and convince
me".
(Professor Bynner) I think we underestimate
the value of some research. Sure Start is based on very solid
evidence about the impact of poverty on educational achievements.
It takes time, it is cumulative, you cannot expect to do a bit
of research and the next day the Government turns 180 degrees
round. Gradually climates of opinion are supported by empirical
evidence which governments respond to. They try and find the best
way of solving the problems, for example the "connexions"
service for teenagers that comes from studies of young people
who are not involved in education training or employment. Again
you saw a relationship, not entirely direct because it moved in
steps, from pieces of work that had been done showing up what
the factors were that predicted this sort of problem and then
a service emerging to deal with it. I am not as pessimistic.
(Professor Tomlinson) Disability and special needs
would be another good example where policy has changed.
Chairman
69. You have given Paul a whole raft of research
based policy that has come through, what is worrying to us looking
at diversity is we had a group of academics, your colleagues,
who all had different interpretations of the research and the
efficacy of diversity in secondary education. It is not easy for
governments and politicians to assess what the right research
is to base your policy on.
(Professor Tomlinson) We can pick out
examples of specific policy that we think are okay, like Sure
Start.
70. That is easy. What bit of research have
you done that the Government have not provided a policy for that
they should get on and do it?
(Professor Tomlinson) It is not specific research.
We have pointed out, certainly John and I have, there are enormous
policy contradictions. The major policy contradiction is between
currently the move towards so-called diversity and the move towards
selection, and so on, and the whole notion of inclusion in an
education system. There is research which is now demonstrating
that this is the wrong way to go if you really want to improve
the education system for everyone. It seems to me that we can
produce the research, some of it may be contradictory, but the
research seems to be going in that way, it is pointing to a major
contradiction in our education system at the moment. You cannot
have a market place, a competitive education system and make it
socially inclusive and bring social justice in for everybody.
71. Do you all agree with that?
(Dr Smith) I am not sure. I am relatively new to this.
Research that I have read indicates that school selection has
not lead to schools being in decline. I see contradictory evidence
and I need to decide for myself not so much what I believe or
do not believe but I need to balance them up. Your point about
evidence-based policy, I guess it is the responsibility of education
researchers to produce good quality research, which brings us
back to the very first point you made right at the start about
the quality of education research, it probably works both ways.
(Professor Bynner) I agree with the last point and
also the previous point about the contradictions.
Ms Munn
72. Back when I was at school girls did not
do as well as boys and girls were deemed to be at fault, now boys
do not do as well as girls and the system is the problem. Is that
a fair summary?
(Professor Bynner) I think it is these
expectations of what is going on outside. I must say it is one
of the great achievements, a very positive approach to girls'
achievements in education has been going on a long time and it
has paid off. Equal opportunities policies in the 70s have paid
off in the long term. There is no longer a separate and inferior
route for girls, when they are expected to leave school at the
earliest possible age or maybe do clerical jobs, and that is it.
They have now overtaken boys in university entrance, which is
staggering, even doing better in A-levels. Currently I think the
bigger problem in the gender issue is for boys without qualifications,
they see a very gloomy world ahead of them because there is not
as much opportunity as there used to be.
73. The future is female!
(Professor Bynner) The future is education.
74. I am pleased that girls are achieving but
I think there are wider implications for society if boys do not
achieve. What should we do to enable boys to achieve more but
not at the expense of girls achieving?
(Dr Smith) If you look at the gender gap over 25 years
in English, a subject where girls are out-performing boys, it
has been constant, girls have out-performed boys by the same amount
over a 25 year period, which suggests that may have gone back
further. If you want girls and boys to do the same in English
you change the assessment system, you make the assessment system
gender-neutral, which it is largely. In science and maths boys
and girls performance is relatively the same, their achievement
is relatively constant, the gap between the achievement is relatively
constant. The point at which achievement between boys and girl
took a great leap was in 1988 with the introduction of course
work, and the national curriculum but beyond that the achievement
gap has remained relatively constant.
75. Do I understand what you are saying is in
a sense it is not the performance that was different it was the
means of assessment.
(Dr Smith) I think that might well be the case. That
is something that you need to consider and take into account.
The issue with course work, again this is something where there
is contradictory evidence, is some evidence suggests that course
work has not made a difference between the performance of boys
and girls and other evidence suggests that girls get on and do
their course work and they do not have to cram at the last minute.
In my mind I am not sure which one I agree with. The real issue
is that in the course subjects of English, maths and science.
With maths and science the assessment system is rather gender-neutral,
but where girls do do better is in English, and that has happened
for some considerable time.
Chairman: I am afraid we are going to
have to let you go to your next appointment. Can I thank you for
attending, it has been a very refreshing evidence session. We
would have kept you much longer if you had not had a hot date
after this. Can I ask you as you are travelling onwards that if
there is something that you would have liked to have said to the
Committee would you drop us a line. Can we write to you if we
need further information when we have digested today's session.
It was a very refreshing day. Thank you very much indeed.
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