Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)

WEDNESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2002

PROFESSOR STEPHEN GORARD, PROFESSOR JAMES TOOLEY AND PROFESSOR RICHARD PRING

Valerie Davey

  40. May I pick up the general acclamation for equitable funding, which was one of John's major themes? Does that mean equal funding?
  (Professor Pring) No. Back to the old Aristotelian principle: you treat everybody the same unless good grounds can be given for treating them differently. There may always be grounds which you can put forward for saying that these particular children, or these particular areas will need more funding. You would have to justify this and it might be because these are particularly deprived areas or it may mean these children have particular disabilities which require greater investment. I think "equitable" means that you actually justify differences and you do so on grounds which are educational or social which are quite transparent and quite public.

  41. Would the other two agree with that?
  (Professor Tooley) Yes, it is a well accepted principle. It is embedded in our system now that children in deprived areas with certain deprived backgrounds get more funding than others.

  42. So your voucher scheme, which you are advocating would be differential.
  (Professor Tooley) It could well be, yes. The other aspect of the equitable funding which is worth bringing in is that parents might also want to pay more for their schooling. They may value education more highly than others and they should be allowed to do so, providing that base of equity is met through the funding. That is a very important principle.
  (Professor Gorard) I feel that at least temporarily you would not simply divide the pot up equally. You would look for areas where there was disadvantage and try to do something to that. There is a danger of reinforcing poor practice or whatever, but you cannot overcome that. However, it would have to be a temporary measure. What I was saying was that probably the current funding arrangements owe a lot to long-term history and they ought to be regularly updated, using the transparent ideas that Richard Pring was talking about.

  43. May I continue with the issue of social inclusion? Although we can see, as we indicated earlier, that there are links between poverty and achievement or lack of them, the underlying philosophy, certainly of this Government and I should say of everybody around this table, is that there is an underpinning concern for social inclusion. How far do you think admissions policy should be the criterion for assessing how far we are getting with that?
  (Professor Gorard) I do not think I would say that should be the criterion. It might be one of the main agencies, at least in the short term, by which you could actually achieve such inclusion, by modifying and ameliorating the admission arrangements.

  44. You showed from the research and the work we have had from you that different systems lead to greater or more, not inclusion but sadly segregation. I should like to make it positive. What are the aspects then? It seemed to me from our earlier conversation that it was admissions, but what aspects would you give then to be those which we need to look at or differentiate between schools in whatever aspect to bring about social inclusion?
  (Professor Gorard) We are stuck with the geography issue which is that because of the differential nature of the housing we have the intakes of schools, if they are rigorously tied to housing, are clearly going to be socially segregated. It may not be so much the case in central London but in most of the rest of the country where you live determines whom you go to school with and the education, parental occupation, income, background of the parents of other students in the school. I would say that long term you might work to overcome that issue—there are countries in the world where that is not the case—so that there is mixed housing. There are even experiments going on in this country with mixed housing where presumably long term this issue would not arise and you could simply allocate children to their nearest school. At least until we get that, you would have to allow freedom of choice because that appears to be the thing which reduces segregation, but without diversity and without constraints. In my view you would have to have some kind of means-tested free transport to the school of choice. What a lot of LEAs are doing at the moment is saying that because the central government legislation says you can express a preference for any school you want, you can do that, but they are only going to pay for a bus to the nearest school. So if you choose a school which is not the nearest school, then they are not going to pay for it. So parental choice only applies to certain people who can afford it, people who can drive Volvos to the next nearest school. That is a problem. The second issue is that many LEAs are providing free transport of that type to the non-nearest school if that school is of a particular type, like a religious or particular language school. That is just driving up segregation. You would want to stop that in order to drive up inclusion.

  45. Are there any comments from either of the others?
  (Professor Pring) There has been a lot of work on the admission policy, particularly from Anne West at the London School of Economics and Schagen at The London Institute. What one has is a mess, quite frankly. It is not just a mess that there are many different sorts of rules on admissions, which can be very bewildering for parents who have not got to grips with all this, but also because even when the rules are made explicit, there are other implicit rules which are operating which people are not aware of. There is a lot of work on this and once again transparency is important but also once again admission rules should only discriminate where good grounds can be given. One of the ways in which discrimination is being made and it certainly comes out of Anne West's work, is where you are allowed to interview. In some admission policies you can interview, in others you cannot interview. An interview then becomes a hidden way in which you differentiate between people, not for officially given grounds, but for grounds which enable you quite frankly to exclude certain people because they will not help you very well to acquire a greater proportion of As to Cs and thus shove you down the league table. There has to be a look at admission policies but I would want to say less choice quite frankly and I would want to say that people would be expected to go to their particular local school. And where you would find a popular view against that, then one begins to look at the reason for that and where those reasons for that are due to bad leadership or one thing or another, you do something about that. Where it is due to very, very real difficulties, then you put in whatever is needed to make that school work. In other words, I do not think you are going to improve the system simply by getting freedom of choice. That would advantage certain people. There is a lot of evidence now that this would advantage certain people; some people have the choice and other people just do not have the choice. If one of our greatest concerns in our society is really how to deal with disillusioned young people, those who are alienated from the system, then we have to concentrate on making sure they are not further disadvantaged by having to go to schools nobody else wants to go to. That must be one of the most important things we have to address.

Chairman

  46. Do you not feel at all embarrassed by the fact that your own university is based on the interview principle in terms of selecting your students? You have deprived schools of the interview techniques which you value so highly as a university.
  (Professor Pring) First of all, I find it a privilege belonging to a university which supported me in my pursuit of comprehensive schools against all sorts of political opposition. May I also say, being a member of the Vice Chancellor's Working Party on Access, that I am very much aware of the enormous efforts being made within the university to widen access? The interview issue . . .

  47. It is just that when we were in the United States looking at higher education admissions policies and diversity, the elite universities on both east and west coasts said "We would use the interview system if there were more people like us". They do not use it.
  (Professor Pring) Having sat through many debates on this, if there is no interview, how then do you begin to differentiate when you have to choose one out of three applications when everybody has three or four A levels? Unless you can find some other way of differentiating, I do not see that there is any other way.

  Chairman: I am guilty of a total red herring there. We shall leave that.

Valerie Davey

  48. Going back to my original question, Professor Tooley wanted to add something.
  (Professor Tooley) I agree rather more with Professor Pring than Professor Gorard here. Stephen talked about the difficulties in terms of neighbourhood and therefore you have to bus children around and whatever the cost is in time and safety these factors have to come in. There is no alternative but to make sure that the full schools or educational places are good schools and you have to overcome those difficulties. My only difference with Richard is that he said you have to put in more resources and you have to have a top-down approach to improvement. I would suggest that the improvements should come from the bottom up through allowing parents to have demand and for educational entrepreneurs to respond to the demand which is there, therefore having vouchers in particularly difficult areas.
  (Professor Gorard) The question you asked was about social inclusion, not whether the schools were good or not. I would disagree with both of the other commentators because the point is that if you want social inclusion you do have to mix up the intakes otherwise you are going to have large areas of social housing and the nearby school will only have people from social housing. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but the social inclusion agenda would say you have to mix these people up so that whom you go to school with is not determined by how much you can afford to pay for your rent and for your house. That would be my point. I should also like to take issue with Richard Pring's point about the evidence for the damaging effects of choice. That is actually one of my areas of expertise. I have yet to see anything; it just does not exist. Unlike the question where I did not know the answer, that is a question where I do know the answer and there is none.

Jeff Ennis

  49. Some of the main critics of the government's diversification agenda would say that we are in danger of creating a two-tier educational system. Given that is a factor we have to be aware of, how key is the role of the local education authority in making sure that does not happen?
  (Professor Pring) One of the objections about the LEA system is the different levels of resources to schools which seem to have no justification other than the fact that they are in different geographical areas of the country. I saw some massive figures recently; a primary school child in one part of the country may be attracting about £1,000 less than a primary school child in another part of the country. Those are the extremes but it does not seem to me that rationally you can justify that any more. I believe this is being addressed. One needs a level ground for funding. One might say more funding for certain areas of the country where it is more expensive to attract teachers but that would be a rational way of approaching it. On the other hand at the same time the schools have to be responsive to local needs to some extent and once you isolate the control of schooling away from that locality, then you are not going to have that sensitivity to local needs. I am a great believer in maintaining local authority responsibilities for schools, albeit within that sort of national framework of funding and national framework of curriculum.
  (Professor Tooley) The question was in order to avoid a two-tier educational system. My comments earlier would suggest that I think we already have a multi-tiered system and I am not in favour of monolithic systems, so I am not sure of the premise. What is the role of local authorities is the underlying issue. Based on the principle that competition can bring about good results and monopoly often brings about poor results, the local education authority is a local education monopoly and therefore would seem to be undesirable. I would not like to have to buy my food from a place under the local nutrition authority. Why would I want to get schooling from something which is monolithic?

  50. So we ought to do away with the LEAs and not bother about things like home-to-school transport and overall admissions policies.
  (Professor Tooley) There are certain functions there which Social Services could deal with.

  51. Do you not think Social Services have enough problems to deal with?
  (Professor Tooley) The 2002 Education Act talks about giving schools' governing bodies the ability to form companies to provide services which were otherwise provided by local education authorities. I support that wholeheartedly.

  52. We have had one or two scandals, have we not, in the further education field because that was allowed to develop?
  (Professor Tooley) Are we talking about further education now?
  (Professor Gorard) We have done studies and in particular we looked at 61 LEAs and talked to the people and the schools involved in doing it and looked at their role. We have a hunch, and it cannot be as solid as some of the other things I have said which were based on very large scale data sets, that the lack of damage caused by increased market forces in this case, increased school choice, has been due to the buffering effect of the LEA. In many areas LEAs have worked to ameliorate problems which they saw arising as a result of competition, so they had actually worked as a useful intermediary in that effect. They have limitations in that they were largely, the ones we have spoken to at least, concerned to try to keep numbers healthy in schools. They were not particularly concerned with the actual composition of schools; in the hierarchy of needs that was higher up. Their first concern was with changing populations. Hounslow was one example where they have huge problems with influxes and outflows and so on to keep healthy numbers in schools. They have the buildings and teachers in the wrong place for the population. They has issues as soon as they try to change the catchment area or change something about admission procedures then the individual local councils who represent the local people squeal. It is very, very difficult for them to make any changes at all. They do have a role and I think their role has been largely beneficial in buffering potential damage caused by changes over time. They are kind of emasculated in what they do because of the nature of local councils.

Chairman

  53. We had the impression when we visited Birmingham for a week and looked at their education system that they are a rather effective local education authority and the director there was Professor Tim Brighouse, one of your colleagues professionally. Have any of you done any work on what seemed to be a very much improved system of education, certainly in terms of results, in Birmingham?
  (Professor Gorard) Our national data includes Birmingham, but it was not one of the local areas we looked at. We looked at three contiguous areas and that was not one of them.
  (Professor Tooley) The key point is one which has been made already that local education authorities have very few powers at the moment, so you can have a very effective school system in spite of whatever the local authority is doing. I do not know about Birmingham, so I am not commenting but funding now is devolved 85 to 90% to schools. Schools are pretty much in charge of their own budgets and affairs, local authorities are involved in school improvement services, transport has been mentioned and special needs, one or two other relatively minor things nowadays.

Jeff Ennis

  54. Going back to something Professor Pring said earlier with which I totally agree, one thing which is making a difference in education in this country is the massive investment which this government has made into early years education and linking that into what I consider to be one of the main factors of underachievement which has also come out of this morning's discussion which is the poverty factor, I just wanted to ask Professor Pring and the other witnesses what value they feel SureStart will provide in secondary education in years to come. Is it a good investment for the future or is it just a waste of money?
  (Professor Pring) I have to say I believe it is a good investment because my colleague Kathy Sylva, upon whose research a lot of it was based, is convinced of its value.

Chairman

  55. She is a specialist adviser to this Committee.
  (Professor Pring) I am glad I have said the right thing then. Putting that money in has been a great initiative and Kathy is really following this through very carefully with her own research. All the indications are, from talking to her that yes, it is paying dividends to a considerable extent.
  (Professor Tooley) I came to talk about secondary education not early years but I am aware of the evidence of the equivalent programmes in the USA. Unfortunately it seems quite pessimistic that after very good initial starts the programmes have not carried on through.

  56. You have been a bit reluctant to talk about the link which other academics talk about, this clear link between poverty and underachievement.
  (Professor Tooley) Would I be reluctant?

  57. You seem to be reluctant to address that subject. Professor Gorard in his research and Professor Pring in his comments this morning have emphasised this link clearly between poverty and underachievement. Listening to what you say, I am not quite sure how your view of how the system would change would benefit those people who have underachieved because they come from very poor backgrounds.
  (Professor Tooley) I would hope that the evidence I gave in this document illustrates quite clearly that the type of voucher proposals are targeted at the poor and disadvantaged and succeed in raising achievement in those areas for the poor and disadvantaged. That is the key of the Milwaukee and Cleveland voucher experiments in evidence; it is also there in terms of the Swedish evidence and it is true in other areas as well. It is very much a concern of mine. Of course I have to agree with the evidence that poverty and low achievement often go together. That can be for a combination of factors. One of them could be in terms of poor schools.
  (Professor Gorard) I am only speaking as a consumer of other people's research. I have great admiration for Kathy Sylva's work and I have an ex colleague who worked with her on that project. I have reservations about the long-term impact of these things based on two things. One is that you have already talked about international studies, the PISA study and so on, but countries which are doing particularly well quite often have very late school starts compared with us. We do not know what the cause and effect is. The other issue is one of time frame. With certain time frames if you were going to work out what the impact of early years learning they would have to be long term, we would have to have a long-term study. Kathy Sylva has not been funded and I am not sure people would be prepared to wait, but the studies which James Tooley is referring to from the US suggest that they are a good thing for the short term, but that by the time people come to leave school, go to secondary school, the impact has dissipated.

Paul Holmes

  58. May I explore one or two things Professor Tooley said earlier in a bit more detail? You agreed with the general statement my colleague made that schools should have equitable funding, or pupils should have. You said in your opening statement that private education was more cost effective. The average private pupil in Britain has two to three times as much spent on their education a year as the average state pupil and they also tend to select very much from higher social classes, they have far fewer children with special needs, they have far fewer children who qualify for free school meals. In what way then is the private sector in Britain more cost effective and equitable?
  (Professor Tooley) Unfortunately there is no evidence in the studies here to refer to. You talked first about the amount of money which is spent on private versus public education. No-one knows what amount of money is spent on state education because you never factor in the capital costs of buildings, whereas those costs are always factored in to the private sector costs. The Centre for Policy Studies recently wrote a report which gave a much more comparable figure between state and private funding. That is the first point. The second point is that there are private schools within this country which are charging very low amounts and making surplus or profits. These are the schools one should look at to see the potential of the private sector, not the elitist private schools you are evidently referring to. The schools in the Girls' Day School Trust for instance operate on much lower things but are more or less comparable when you are including cost of capital to the equivalent state schools. CfBT has opened two schools, one in Medway where fees are £900 per term, £2,700 per year, considerably less than the equivalent cost of the state system; that includes cost of recurrent and capital and profit and the school seems to be very effective. There are no studies in this country. There are the studies in the US, the Coleman report, there are studies from around the world where these are compared. Unfortunately we do not have such a study here.

  59. You have said that ideally you would like to see no state role in the provision of education at all, but in the real world you accept it is going to happen and you just want to minimise it as much as possible. There is a lot of evidence, for example statistics in a lot of the evidence which has been submitted by Professor Gorard and Professor Pring which show that basically you could argue private schools and grammar schools and faith schools and specialist schools are successful because they are selective in their various ways. Would you agree with that?
  (Professor Tooley) Faith schools, specialist schools . . .?


 
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