Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
WEDNESDAY 27 NOVEMBER 2002
MR DAVID
TAYLOR, MISS
KATH CROSS,
MR TIM
KEY AND
MR MIKE
RALEIGH
Paul Holmes
120. We have just asked you.
(Mr Taylor) But we have not been asked by Government
to give that advice, so we have not given it.
Chairman
121. What would you advise this Committee?
(Mr Taylor) We would advise you to take that matter
up with the Government because it is the Government that make
the decision.
122. Do you think that every school should have
the opportunity to become a specialist school?
(Mr Taylor) Our function is to provide the evidence
about the quality of education in these schools. It is for others
to draw the conclusions as to whether that is right.
123. Mr Taylor, you are squirming a little,
are you not?
(Mr Taylor) I am not; I am feeling extremely comfortable.
124. On the evidence that you have so far, do
you tell this Committee that it is a good spend of taxpayers'
money to invest in specialist schools? Is it proving to be and
are you satisfied that this great deal of taxpayers' money being
ploughed into specialist schools is delivering higher standards?
(Mr Taylor) I think we are satisfied that the evidence
we have shows some encouraging features such that Mr Raleigh has
already outlined, and the data we have shown you include many
encouraging features, but I would not say that that is a sufficient
basis for radical change of Government policy and I would also
say that it is not Ofsted's function to advise on whether a particular
policy ought to be taken forward in that way.
125. I am not asking you that. I would not want
to embarrass you. What I am asking you is that your job is this
massive operation of Ofsted with thousands of people working for
you and have you come to a judgment whether specialist schools
are driving up standards?
(Mr Taylor) We have come to a number of judgments
about improvements that Mr Raleigh has outlined; we have not come
to a judgment that the inference to be taken from those findings
is such as to influence Government policy in a particular way.
Paul Holmes
126. You said in the 2001 report that technology,
language and arts colleges were improving attainment at a faster
rate than the national average but, in the latest report that
you have just produced, you are saying that the improvement is
only similar to national averages. Is that because you are looking
to the older established specialist schools and now the newer
established ones? What is the reason for the difficulty between
the two?
(Mr Raleigh) It is a large number of schools. The
biggest growth has been in arts and sports colleges rather than
technology and languages, a higher proportion of the schools having
been in the programme for a short period remembering that some
of the original schools go back to 1992.
127. When you say in 2001 that some of these
schools were improving faster than the national average rate and
this year the ones you have looked at are similar to the national
rate, how far do you also look back at what they were doing three
or four or five years ago before they became specialist schools
and compare whether they were improving at the same rate before
they were specialist as they were afterwards or whether there
is a marked difference?
(Mr Raleigh) We looked at the examination trend of
1997 to 2002 and, where the schools were inspected, we checked,
as indeed the inspection does always, the progress against the
school's previous inspection.
128. So where, this year, you say that they
are improving at a similar rate to other schools, were they improving
at a similar rate five years ago or have they become better?
(Mr Raleigh) I am not sure that I could give you an
answer on five years ago. I could certainly come back to you on
that. I imagine that what you are asking is, was the trend of
improvement . . .
129. . . . there anyway before they became specialist?
Professor Gorard was making this point last week.
(Mr Raleigh) You would absolutely expect that the
trend of improvement in GCSE performance had not been there for
three years before the bid was made because that was part of the
piece, that we needed to show a track record of that kind. The
criteria did not say how much, it said "some improvement
over three years."
130. If somebody, like the Government for example,
were to say that the evidence is that specialist schools improve
attainment by greater than the national average or whatever, is
that not a self-fulfilling prophesy if you can only become a specialist
school because you are already showing that you are improving?
(Mr Raleigh) The schools are self-selected and their
bids were approved on the basis of criteria including those that
I have outlined, and they were supported both through the resources
and by the advice and guidance they were receiving from the Department
and elsewhere. So, it would be a surprise and a disappointment
if they were not improving and continuing to.
(Mr Taylor) There are no self-fulfilling prophesies
in examination results.
131. You could almost say that they become specialist
schools because they are becoming successful rather than they
are successful because they became specialist schools.
(Mr Raleigh) Yes. I think our basic conclusion in
the report —
132. Is that a definite "yes"?
(Mr Raleigh) Our basic conclusion in the report last
year was that the programme has helped to accelerate improvement.
These were schools which were improving.
133. Except that, on this year, you say that
the improvement is not the same as the national figure anyway.
(Mr Raleigh) Yes, across the range of the schools,
you would expect inspectors to dig into the detail of different
types of colleges and so on and the picture is more varied. Could
I just come back to the value for money question since it is something
that we pointed to in our report last year. What we said was that
for most—and that meant 80%—of the schools demonstrating
good value for money in their general spending but, in particular,
on their use of the revenue funding and the capital allocation
of specialist schools—a different group of schools, but
it turned out still to be 80%—our conclusion was that one
in five schools was making disappointing use of opportunities
and resources and that asks the question of the Department for
Education & Skills as to how, if it proposes to go ahead with
the implementation of policy, they are going to make sure that
it is going to be 100% who make very good use of their additional
resources.
Mr Simmonds
134. To follow up the previous question from
Paul Holmes, is there any evidence in your research that either
schools that successfully applied become specialist schools or
schools that have applied and have not been successful to date
are merely doing so to get their hands on the additional money
that was going to the schools?
(Mr Raleigh) Among the 20% that we did not think were
making good use of the opportunities of the programme, there were
certainly some whose commitment to it did not seem at all strong,
and that might be for a number of reasons—the advantage
of the status without actually living it through, the opportunity
to get £100,000 worth of capital programme and apply it within
the rules of the scheme - but they were not pushing it through.
(Mr Taylor) What I would say is that is one of the
ways in which Ofsted, on the evidence, can be rather helpful in
a sense of providing a checking balance on what might be just
seen as a bit of extra buckshee funding and we can point to the
fact that if schools have entered into the scheme in that spirit,
then they are unlikely to get as good a positive outcome on the
inspection report as those which are committed not just to getting
extra money, which most people would like, but to the real underlying
principles of the scheme.
135. With those that have been successful in
getting the specialist status and thereby getting additional funds,
do you feel that these additional funds are being used to develop
the specialisms or to improve, as I think you stated in your report,
more widely the whole school performance?
(Mr Taylor) That was indeed one of the things we looked
at because plainly it is a concern that, if you give money for
a specific purpose and it is being used openly for more general
purposes . . . We did analyse that.
(Mr Raleigh) It is quite a tricky balance as to how
much you spend in a number of ways on that subject as opposed
to trying to generalise the applications of better teaching and
learning across the whole range of subjects and, under the regime
of this programme from 1999, 30% of the funding needs to be spent
on the community dimension, so you work with the other schools
and you have to try and balance that.
Mr Pollard
136. I want to pursue what Mark Simmonds and
Paul Holmes have questioned you on. One of the schools in my constituency
is the lowest achieving school of high achieving schools generally
represented in a very middle-class area. This school has a massive
sports hall, a gymnasium and huge school playing fields. It applied
for a sports status and was turned down and is now applying for
a science status and that would seem to me to suggest that they
were chasing the money rather than chasing the specialism. They
are already a specialist sports school and are recognised in the
area to be such. Does that not confirm what I think you were saying,
that it is the money that is being chased rather than the . .
.? Moving on, it says in our report here that schools have pride
and celebrate their status and is that the reason why there is
more enthusiasm and standards are being driven up and that there
is perhaps an elitism that is creeping in there?
(Mr Taylor) I do not think we would say that pride
and an ability to celebrate or willingness to celebrate the status
necessarily is the same as elitism, but I think any system like
this has the potential for creating a tendency towards sheep and
goats and therefore I think this Committee is right to be pursuing
whether, in the desire to promote diversity, you risk hierarchical
schools. That does seem to be an important question. Those excluded
from a particular group may well see that group as inherently
desirable to be a member of and therefore want to be part of it
and apply for it. It does not necessarily follow that those outside
that group are inferior in any way, but it does mean that they
are recognising that membership of this club is potentially one
which has benefits. I think the fact of having to go through the
process and being subject to fairly strict controls is one that
means that any bounty hunters are going to be unsuccessful because
the process is designed precisely to weed out people who just
think that it did not work under category A, so they will try
under B and C and see if they can get the money that way. I think
it is important that the specialist status is related to known
and recognisable achievement within the specialist area for which
the application is being made.
Chairman
137. Have you evidence that a specialist school
getting that designation in an area has a poor effect on neighbouring
schools?
(Mr Taylor) I think it has always been one of the
risks and I think it is very important to come back to one of
the points that Mr Raleigh was making earlier, that we look at
how well it is situated within a local community, how well it
is collaborating both with its feeder schools and the neighbourhood
schools and the more that can be done to overcome any kind of
image that suggests it is an oasis in a barren desert, the better.
Mr Chaytor
138. Does your inspection evidence tell us anything
about whether the best rate of return for the Department's money
is obtained by rewarding schools that are already on a trend of
upward achievement or investing in schools that are really struggling?
I suppose what I am trying to say is, what does the evidence suggest
about the value of the specialist schools programme as against
the excellence in cities programme in delivering improvements
in rural schools and valued added?
(Mr Taylor) Our general line would be that, if it
is only focused on those schools which are relatively high performance
or are improving well, then the strategy is incomplete and therefore
what you are inviting us to say is that, both for the Department
and for us really, it is important to look at those schools which
are most in need of improvement and the effectiveness of the various
strategies that we have, and both Mr Raleigh and Miss Cross have
been involved in aspects of monitoring this, Miss Cross, for example,
through the monitoring of the schools facing challenging circumstances,
which is the target group of exactly the type of schools that
you are talking about and I wonder if we could ask her to say
a word about that.
(Miss Cross) We have been monitoring schools on that
list of schools facing challenging circumstances, which is now
about 600 schools, and our evidence so far is that the schools
are using the money sensibly to tackle the things that lead to
improvement. It is a little slow in some places, slower than we
would hope to see, but, for about a quarter of the schools that
we visited last year, there had been an increase in the GCSE and
other key stage four results, but sadly the school which has difficulties
and low attainment, the five A* to C grade, is usually the last
one to actually show improvement, but there were many signs of
improvement. However, these schools are working in difficult circumstances
as are other schools that we visited in terms of special measures
and certainly we know there that increases in support for the
school and funding has helped those schools to deliver some of
the things they have been wanting to do.
139. Have you have produced a similar report
to the report on specialist schools which brings all this statistical
information together?
(Miss Cross) Yes. A year ago, which was the first
time we had done this, we produced a report for ourselves and
shared it with the DfES and we have updated that.
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