Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 419)
WEDNESDAY 7 MAY 2003
MR DAVID
MILIBAND, MP AND
MR STEPHEN
TWIGG, MP
Q400 Chairman: Could we have an answer
on that?
Mr Miliband: Of course.
Q401 Mr Chaytor: It would be very
useful. If we are unique then other questions follow from that
uniqueness.
Mr Miliband: When I say I do not
know the answer, I assume that means someone is going to follow
up and we will write to you with answers to the questions I do
not know, and the ones I got wrong.
Q402 Mr Chaytor: On the question
of evaluation is not the real issue about the tests not the tests
themselves or the frequency or the content but the relationship
between the test scores and the publication of league tables?
This is what puts pressure on teachers, pressure on head teachers,
pressure on governing bodies and this is what parents are increasingly
concerned about. My question, therefore, is what evidence is there
about the difference between the teacher internal assessment and
the scores for children in external tests? Have we done a study
of this? Is this not absolutely the most crucial point?
Mr Twigg: The evidence that I
am aware of is very specific, which is the evidence at Key Stage
1, so it is the evidence at the end of infant school, where there
is a very close correlation between the outcome of the teacher
assessments that are conducted as part of Key Stage 1 and the
outcome of the tests. Of course those are tests that are administered
and conducted by the teachers so in a sense you are comparing
two things that are more closely similar. I am not aware of any
similar work that has been done at later stages, even Key Stage
2, but I am happy to look into that and write to you on it.
Q403 Mr Chaytor: If you could look
into it. Depending on the results of your findings, would it not
be useful to have a similar piece of work done for Key Stage 2?
Surely if the teacher internal assessment is as valid, or as near
as damn it as valid, as the external test, the question is why
do we bother with the whole structure of external tests?
Mr Miliband: You raise an important
point but remember that the workload implications of teachers
taking on marking and assessment of the kind you are suggesting
is something that would have to be borne in mind in any decision
about that as a factor.
Q404 Mr Chaytor: Surely the point
is that teachers are making the internal assessments anyway. It
is the external testing that is some sort of super structure built
on what is already done, is it not?
Mr Miliband: It is not clear that
is the case.
Mr Twigg: One would assume also
even if you were to move in that direction testing would still
be part of that assessment process which would have workload implications.
Q405 Mr Chaytor: Assessment has always
been part of every school's activities long before year zero.
Mr Twigg: My point is a different
point from David which is that testing would also still be part
of the assessment presumably, so if you did not have the externally
provided and marked test at Key Stage 2 then that would have the
workload implications that David has referred to.
Q406 Mr Chaytor: Formal tests have
always been part of teaching assessments.
Mr Twigg: Absolutely.
Q407 Mr Chaytor: The issue is whether
these are national tests, whether they are highly standardised
and whether the results are published and placed in a pecking
order. This is the key issue that people are concerned about.
My next question is in terms of the league tables, the publication
of test data, or of certain test data, what do you think is the
main purpose? Is it to enable parents to better express a preference
about the school they would prefer their children to go to?
Mr Twigg: I think it has a number
of purposes. Giving an indication to parents, but also to the
wider community, of the progress that schools are making is important.
I think that the direction that we are wanting to move in, to
which David has already referred, is about having more sophisticated
information available, crucially including the value added information.
I think the big challenge, and this is one of the things we are
going to address in the primary document to it—I do not
have a simple answer to it but it is a challenge—is to get
the value added indicator to have at least equal currency with
the raw data in terms of outcomes. The difference that a school
is making in progressing the pupils within that school must surely
be at least as important as the results that cohort has delivered.
How we achieve that is something that we all need to discuss but
I think there has been a general acceptance that that shift to
value added is a fairer reflection of the difference that the
school is making, which surely is what parents are in part looking
at when considering whether to send their child to the school.
Q408 Mr Chaytor: The methodology
we have for value added at the moment produces a set of scores
that are actually quite narrowly differentiated from the parents'
point of view, they are either side of 100, are they not?
Mr Twigg: I understand that.
Q409 Mr Chaytor: And it is quite
different from seeing scores of, say, 80% of five A-C at GCSE.
We have some way to go to giving the level of impact to value
added.
Mr Twigg: I totally agree with
that and in a sense that is the background to the point I just
made. I think for any of us when we looked at those figures when
they were published for the first time last year it was hard to
get a sense of what the difference really was between 100.8 and
99.1. I think we do need to look at ways that describe the achievement
and progress that schools are making. Primary schools is what
I am concentrating on but I think it has a wider applicability.
I am only really at the point of identifying that this is an issue
that we need to solve. I am on the lookout for solutions for it.
Q410 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the
existing league tables, both primary and secondary, what do you
think is the biggest single determinant of a school's position
in the league tables?
Mr Twigg: I think in a sense it
is a bit like some of the earlier questions to David. Probably
the single biggest will still be the circumstances of the school
socially and economically, but within that there will be great
variation between schools in similar circumstances. We can have
the discussion about how we define the similar circumstances but
I think all of us would see, even from our own constituencies,
schools that broadly speaking have similar intakes in terms of
social and economic background but where, because of the learning
and teaching and leadership within the schools, the results and
other features of the school will vary greatly.
Q411 Mr Chaytor: Does it follow that
with comparatively few exceptions the same schools and the same
local authorities are going to be broadly in the same band of
the league tables because of their intake?
Mr Twigg: I only think very, very
broadly. I am sorry to always use London as an example but it
is where a lot of my work is. We can look at some really good
examples, either at the LEA wide level in a borough like Tower
Hamlets which is one of the poorest boroughs, if not possibly
the poorest borough in the country, that has achieved incredible
progress or individual schools that have done the same for me
to say that broadly, yes, that is right but it is very broad and,
in a sense, getting broader. Earlier David referred to some of
the evidence from the literacy and numeracy strategies and the
improvements at Key Stage 2 where indications are that actually
the biggest improvements have been amongst those pupils from the
poorest backgrounds.
Mr Miliband: I referred earlier
to the different performance within each free school meal band.
I am sure I am right in saying that the lowest performing schools
and LEAs in the lowest free school meal band overlap with the
highest performers in the highest free school meal band. I think
it may even be the case that the bottom quartile of schools in
the lowest free school meal band overlaps with the highest quartile
of performers in the highest free school meal band. In other words,
there is a lot of overlap. There is a very simple chart that the
Department has that shows you median performance and the inter-quartile
ranges and the full variance and it will show you the degree of
overlap, which I think goes to the heart of some of the questions
that both Paul and David have been asking. I do not know if you
have that.
Q412 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the
parents' perception of league tables, however, do you not think
that there is an inevitable dynamic within the league table system
which serves to polarise schools? Given a choice of a school with
ten per cent five A-Cs at GCSE and a school with 90%, all things
being equal and these schools being—
Mr Miliband: There are two very
important points.
Q413 Mr Chaytor: Can I just finish
the question before you give me the answer. Is it not inevitable
that the dynamic will be that parents will inevitably gravitate
towards schools at the top end of the league tables? What impact
does this have on the overall distribution of pupils within schools?
Mr Miliband: There are two things
about this. First, we publish data, we do not publish league tables.
Q414 Mr Chaytor: We know what is
going to happen to the data.
Mr Miliband: You asked your question
and I failed to listen to it and now I am going to give my answer
and I am sure you will not want to fall into the same trap. We
publish the data and in my experience what parents talk about
is not that X school is fourth in the league table, what they
say is "In that school 80% of kids are getting level four".
It is actually the achievement of the individual school that is
more important than its so-called ranking in the league table.
Certainly of the 36 primary schools in South Shields what people
talk about is which schools are doing well and which schools are
doing less well, they do not talk about where it is in the league.
The second point is the implication of what you are saying is
that we should have the data but that no-one else should be entitled
to know about it, which I think is a very unfortunate suggestion.
We have moved beyond a world where professionals can say "We
have got data. We know how different institutions are performing
but I am afraid the great unwashed public out there is not allowed
to know". You asked specifically about whether there is mobility
between schools and whether this exacerbates the problems. Stephen
can maybe talk about the London position where it may be different
but from constituency experience the tradition of the local primary
school is still very strong. I think what we have shown over the
last four or five years is that you can achieve significant improvements
in primary school whatever your intake. If we had been meeting
five years ago in a way I would have been lacking a response to
you but now five years on I can show you what has happened in
schools with higher free school meal bands and that they can make
progress. You referred to a school getting ten per cent of kids
to level four but I do not know of any such school that is getting
ten per cent of kids to level four. We have got a national average
of 75% and 73%, we have got a floor target of 78% for every LEA,
which is 78% of kids reaching level four. I do not believe you
have got 90 to 10 comparisons.
Chairman: That was only by way of illustration.
Q415 Mr Chaytor: That was an illustration
in relation to GCSE scores, not primary school tests yet. Can
we just go back to the publication of data. I am not saying we
should not publish the data, what I am saying is that in other
areas of public services we adopt a different system. For example,
in the health service all the data is available and published
by the Department of Health annually in a thick document but what
the Government chooses to highlight is actually a simple four
category star system—zero, one, two and three stars—as
we will be discussing in the House this afternoon. The question
is in the Education Department we have chosen to focus on one
single arbitrary indicator and that is where the difference is,
is it not? The corollary to the question is what changes to the
league table system do you envisage in the immediate future?
Mr Miliband: If you think that
we get a rough reception when we go to union conferences, I suggest
you go and suggest that we are going to have a system of one school
being a two star school, one being a three star school and another
being a zero star school because if anything is crude, that is.
What we have got is a system where schools can know what percentage
of the kids are reaching different levels. At GCSE you have got
your five A-Cs at GCSE and you have got your average points score.
I think that the drive that exists for schools to improve on their
past performance, sustain and possibly improve on past performance
and learn from and, if possible, emulate similar schools who are
doing better, those are natural and positive processes. The Select
Committee is very welcome to suggest that we should have a demarcation
system for 24,000 schools and that they are ranked as zero, one,
two, three, four stars but—
Q416 Chairman: I did not hear David
Chaytor suggest that at all. He was drawing a comparison between
how we use health data and education data. Minister, it is important,
this information is really at the heart of our inquiry. There
is a tension in certain parts of your Department which naively
believes that the publication of more and more data is in some
way helpful. Indeed, what we know is that it creates tensions
and can provide problems that no-one intended. It is not that
we think the Government is malicious but the fact is that even
in terms of Stephen Twigg's answer just now, Tower Hamlets, for
example, is not meeting its targets and although it has had great
success in raising achievement it is made to feel a failure. That
is the truth, is it not?
Mr Twigg: I have never heard that
from them.
Mr Miliband: No-one in Tower Hamlets
says that they feel like a failure.
Mr Twigg: If there is evidence
of that I have not come across it.
Q417 Chairman: Many schools in similar
positions may be achieving but still do not meet those targets.
Certainly in my own constituency schools in that category are
still made to feel a failure.
Mr Twigg: I have visited quite
a lot of Tower Hamlets' schools over the last year and generally
that has not been the experience I have had in them. There may
be some schools that have got a different experience. The point
I was seeking to make was qualifying my own answer about the socio-economic
factors being broadly the main criteria, emphasising the broad
view by demonstrating a poor area, in this case of London, that
has made a really, really significant advance in terms of its
performance both in primary and in secondary.
Q418 Chairman: You would accept that
there are unintended consequences of publishing and one of them
is league tables. The Minister of State feels quite hurt when
David Chaytor suggests that the Department publishes league tables
but the Department publishes the data on which league tables are
immediately published by other people. That is the truth, is it
not?
Mr Twigg: The only alternative
to that is not to publish that information at all. Yes, people
will turn the information into league tables but we do not do
that.
Q419 Chairman: Certainly Wales and
Scotland have decided not to publish some of that data. Is the
Department closely looking at what impact that will have?
Mr Twigg: Of course we will look
at that but my own instinct is that once information is available
in the public domain the public will expect to have that information.
Let us ensure that it is fully in context, that we have the value
added information alongside it, which is what we were discussing
previously, we have the information about mobility and special
education needs and those sort of contextual factors alongside
it. Once something like this is available as information I do
not think it is possible to go right back to it not being published
and I am not sure that you are even suggesting that we should.
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