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
. . .?
|
