Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-106)
WEDNESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2002
PROFESSOR STEPHEN
GORARD, PROFESSOR
JAMES TOOLEY
AND PROFESSOR
RICHARD PRING
100. So we do not have parental choice.
(Professor Gorard) Not really.
101. What would we need to have to have parental
choice?
(Professor Gorard) You would have to guarantee people
places in the school they chose. You would have to allow schools
to expand and presumably they would reach some sort of optimal
level before people started moving elsewhere. You would probably
be carting Portakabins up and down motorways if you were going
to do that. You would have to get rid of the archaic planned admission
numbers, would you not, and you would have to develop resources
to the schools which were oversubscribed?
102. Choice is the ability to implement your
preference.
(Professor Gorard) I would have thought so, yes.
103. Politically and financially, is it possible
to give parental choice?
(Professor Gorard) I come back again to the point
made by John Baron. There comes a point at which you have to cut
off. I do not know where that would be. Clearly you could not
have unfettered choice. We could probably do more than now.
Chairman: We saw some examples of parental
choice in Birmingham, for example the largest girls' school in
Europe, we were told, was on one side of the city and had an enormous
transportation problem of families travelling round the road system
to attend this school. It just seemed to me that the environmental
and other implications of that sort of travel were frightening
to behold.
Jonathan Shaw
104. Professor Gorard, you said that perhaps
there is not enough diversity in terms of allowing regional variations.
You said that the Government's concentration on trying to get
the system right is predominantly an urban focus and you mentioned
London. Would you advocate allowing regional variations? Perhaps
we need different diversities for different areas rather than
all the schools across England having to have one-size-fits-all.
Does that make sense?
(Professor Gorard) Yes, it does and I guess it is
the logical conclusion of what I am saying, but it was not one
I had expressed previously. I guess some form of differences between
different regions depending on needs but it is the geography underlying
that.
105. That would be a job for whom? A local education
authority:
(Professor Gorard) Devolved government. I do not know.
Chairman
106. We have had a very long session and you
may think we have asked a strange range of diverse questions but
may I ask whether there are any questions we should have asked
you which you would like to comment on?
(Professor Pring) You can have different sorts of
selection but the one thing which is crucial for high quality
education is high quality teachers, both being able to attract
them and then having attracted them to retain them. You could
have all the system changes in the world, you could have all the
resources, but unless you foster the teaching profession and get
intelligent, dedicated people who are going to find professional
satisfaction over a 40-year period in being teachers, then all
the things we have been talking about are worth sweet damn all
quite frankly. I am delighted that you are going to have a select
committee on that, but you really have to link these two things
together and not see them as separate. One of the fascinating
things, with all due respect, is that none of your questions had
anything to do at all with the quality of teaching.
(Professor Gorard) I would just reiterate the point:
beware of advocates of particular approaches. You have to look
at the evidence very, very carefully. May I just make two comments
on two points I made? We did not really get back to the point
about standards. We could have a discussion or I could communicate
with you later if you wanted. The problem you have is the coincidence
of the rise post-1986 and GCSE, particularly when criterion referencing,
allowed us to increase grades, the performance of schools as measured
by exams year on year with the introduction of school choice and
cutting between that. It seems to me that what we need is more
clearly policy-informed research directed at asking specific questions
like that and I am afraid it would have to be experimental. You
would have to bite the bullet of the practical cost and the ethical
issues involved. If you want to know answers to questions like
that, then you are going to have to run experiments in particular
parts of the country. I am not advocating that. I am saying that
if those are the questions you need to answer, I do not think
the kind of dredging through the tea leaves approach to research
is actually going to generate the definitive answer you would
want to put lots and lots of public money into. Coming back to
Paul Holmes' point about the PISA study, I am doing some work
on the PISA study with colleagues, primarily concentrating on
all the EU countries and looking at the issues of equity in relation
to the structure of the school system including the nature of
selection. We have not got very far; we are about half way through.
If you want to keep in touch with that, it might give some insights
into the questions you were asking.
(Professor Tooley) In answer to that question on whether
there was anything else you should have asked, I have actually
been incredibly impressed with the range and depth of the questions.
I thought we would be skating at a much more superficial level
than this. I think there is nothing which you have not covered.
In terms of a summary, diversity of provision when focused on
top-down initiatives is the wrong way to be looking at things.
Diversity of provision is allowing diversity to be expressed through
bottom-up initiatives and diversity may or may not be the outcome
in the end.
Chairman: Thank you again; thanks all
of you. We very much appreciate the time you have given us, the
quality of the answers you have provided. We have not pursued
some avenues such as teacher quality because that is the number
three part of the inquiry and we may well have you back. The fact
of the matter is that we are trying to get a sense of where we
are going in terms of the first part of the look at secondary
education and that was diversity. We have learned a great deal,
this was very important first session. We have now encircled the
problem, we are now getting our bearings as we go forward and
we are at our boldest when we are at our bravest. Thank you very
much for your attendance. That was an excellent session.
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