Oral evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 12 November 2003

Members present:

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr David Chaytor
Valerie Davey
Jeff Ennis
Helen Jones
Mr Kerry Pollard
Jonathan Shaw
Mr Andrew Turner

__________

Memoranda submitted by Mrs Maureen Laycock, Mr Brian Jones and Mr Mike Wood

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MRS MAUREEN LAYCOCK, Headteacher, Firth Park Community College, Sheffield; MR BRIAN JONES, Former Headteacher, Archbishop Tenison's School, Lambeth; and MR MIKE WOOD, Headteacher, The Cornwallis School, Kent; examined.

 

Q427  Chairman: Can I welcome Brian Jones, Mike Wood and Mo Laycock to our deliberations and say that the Committee, as ever, is very grateful when busy people give of their time to help the Committee with an inquiry, so thanks indeed for agreeing to come this morning and help us really to increase our knowledge about the admissions process. We have been looking at secondary education for some months now - this is the final phase of an inquiry - and we are I suppose halfway through this final phase, so we are just about beginning to ask the right questions - or we think we are - but as you are all heads of schools perhaps you will give us an evaluation of our performance after you have heard us! Just to break the ice, can I ask if Mo Laycock could just give us a little background of your school and your experiences briefly? We do know it in a sense because you are were highly recommended by one of our members, Paul Holmes --

Mrs Laycock: A former pupil - when it was a grammar school, I hasten to add!

 

Q428  Chairman: He did not tell us that! He is unfortunately unable to be here because his wife is in hospital, so we have his apologies.

Mrs Laycock: My school is Firth Park Community Arts College in Sheffield; I have been the head teacher there since 1995 when the school was in a serious OFSTED categorisation. It is in Sheffield Brightside and my local MP is David Blunkett. At the point I went there it was split site, falling rolls, low expectations, poor community reputation; it has currently 47 per cent of students on the special needs register for learning and/or emotional behavioural problems, 43 per cent free school meals, 25 per cent black ethnic minority students, and a large proportion of those are refugees and asylum seekers. Its attendance at that time was 77 per cent. We are now a one site school and full, with waiting lists and appeals; our results have gone up from 8 per cent in 1995 to 28 per cent this year and we reckon we will get 32 per cent next year; we are a specialist school in performing arts which has been a significant area of development for the school, and we are the extended school for Sheffield. We continue to serve an area of considerable socio economic deprivation, and low expectations of parents. I think of our 1365 students only four parents have gone on to university, so the issue about raising standards and the issue that is linked in with admissions and getting students to believe in the value of education themselves is something we work very hard on, because we cannot assume that parents are going to give education great value. In my first few years there in relation to admissions we had a spare places because the school was not popular, and I do not know how aware you are of Sheffield but it has huge socio economic divides. I live in Hallam which is the most advantaged apparently political ward in Europe and Brightside is the sixth most disadvantaged in the country, so in relation to the admissions issue I was instructed on very many occasions to take some of the most turbulent, difficult children in the authority whilst trying to improve the school whilst having HMI crawling all over us and that was hugely challenging. I am not in that situation now but it still features in other schools so I feel very strongly about the whole admissions issue.

Mr Wood: I am head of the Cornwallis School in Maidstone; it is a specialist technology college. It is a Kent high school and the Kent selective system means we are what in old parlance would have been a secondary modern. Since 1989 we had 2 per cent 5 As - Cs; we have moved up to 67 per cent. I think the move from 2 to about 45 per cent was very much on the same intake - in other words, the school had massive under achievement. We had gone GM to get independence from the local authority to try to push up standards because we felt that the local attitude, not the politicians but the local people, did not believe you could get a good education in a non selective school. We were about 800 strong at the beginning of the 1990s; now we are 1650. We had no sixth form until 1992. The sixth form now numbers just over 300. We do not have nearly as many free school meals, for instance, as my colleague here - it is about 7 per cent now. Special needs is about 20 per cent; at the beginning of the 90s it might have been just over 30 per cent, so there has been a change in the intake, as I suggested earlier. About 55 youngsters have statements and we have improved things I think by simply believing in the youngsters and by trying to raise their self-esteem, by getting parental support, by lowering class sizes, by putting a lot of individual help in and a whole series of methods over a long period of years.

Mr Jones: I was the head of Archbishop Tenison's until I retired on 31 August of this year. I had been there since 1992. Archbishop Tenison's now is a very different school from the one I inherited. When I went there in 1992 they did not have special measures - it was a school of risk, that was the parlance of that time. Staff morale was pretty low; truancy was rife, as was vandalism in the school; expectations from the staff and the children were very low and there was little or no support coming from the Local Education Authority. We quickly realised at that time - when I say "we" I am talking about my governors and myself - that something fairly radical had to be done if we were to raise standards, and we decided with the parents that the best solution was to break away from Lambeth and become grant-maintained. That gave us the freedom as well as the enhanced resources to begin that very long journey of turning the school around. In 1996 one per cent of our youngsters got 5 and more A - Cs; in the last year I have figures for 56.2 per cent got 5 or more A - Cs, and I think by anybody's reckoning that is a fair improvement. If one takes into account the ability of the cohort on arrival at the school, only about 16 per cent of those youngsters could be regarded as above average, so we went from 16 per cent which is what could have been predicted at the start of the secondary school, to 56.2 per cent. We are in the London borough of Lambeth; about a third of our children come from Southwark, two thirds from Lambeth, and we get a small number of children from the other surrounding boroughs - Westminster, Wandsworth and Lewisham - but not too many. 80 per cent of our children are black: 40 per cent of the total being of Caribbean origin and 40 per cent of the total being of African origin. You will see from the paper that I prepared, Chairman, that I have given you a detailed breakdown of the ethnic results as far as that is concerned, and I think we are hoping that we can as a school dispel the myths that London schools cannot cope with black children and produce good results when 75 per cent of our Caribbean boys get 5 or more A - Cs and 57 per cent of our African boys do. I think I will leave it there.

 

Q429  Chairman: It speaks volumes. What you seem to be saying is that you can get a decent education in London in the state sector. This is about admissions policy so can I ask Mo Laycock, firstly, with the success you have had in driving up your achievements in your school, how far as you became a specialist college for the performing arts, did you use this 10 per cent choice not on ability but on aptitude? Did you use it at all in order to change who you were getting into the school?

Mrs Laycock: No, we did not, and we will not. Indeed, Sheffield is quite an interesting city in relation to the fact that, with the exception of the two church Catholic schools, we are a city of 27 secondary schools that are comprehensive and we have very good collegial relationships with one another and with the Local Education Authority. So no, no Sheffield school selects apart from the two schools that are church schools who have their own admissions arrangements, so I feel strongly that I never would select. If parents opt for our school and put in a preference for our school because they have a child that is particularly good at the arts then they have to join in the normal arrangements for trying to get them a place at the school. The way that we have driven up standards is to work very hard with the community, with the primary schools, with the students to get them to believe in themselves, their own self esteem and self confidence. The arts have driven things up but no, we have not selected.

 

Q430  Chairman: As you have improved your school and as its reputation has improved in the community as a successful school, has a neighbouring school gone on the slide?

Mrs Laycock: In my area of Sheffield - and our area of Sheffield is where the Full Monty was filmed and where the Sheffield steel workers once lived - there are three other secondary schools and I think I put in my paper that two of those were in special measures a few years ago and have been fresh-started - Firth Vale and Parkwood - Hind House was in special measures so we were all appointed as head teachers at a similar time, so on a good day we think our schools are excellent and on a bad day we are as bad as one another. But the Local Education Authority is very good. The director of education there has very much a city wide approach to improvement and to support, but clearly schools like mine and my three other neighbouring schools have attained every strategy that is within the government. I am part of an EAZ, EIC and all aspects of EIC are in my school; New Opportunities Fund, Objective 1, MTAG, MTAG EIC - in fact, when I met David Miliband he thought I had things in my school even he had not heard of! So it is about joining all of those up into a big picture and making sure you use those resources as well as you can to improve the school.

 

Q431  Chairman: So in a sense you are saying no, the other schools around you did not go on the slide.

Mrs Laycock: No, we have all improved hugely.

 

Q432  Chairman: Have you become less of a local community school? In terms of where your pupils come from, as your achievements went up, do you now find people travelling further away in order to come to your school rather than going to their local schools?

Mrs Laycock: No, because when I went to the school less than 50 per cent of the local children were coming to the school. There was no belief in the school; they were travelling the city. We now have 94 per cent of them back. We do have some spillage into the south west of the city where six schools do still have sixth forms and with that comes a whole other number of issues in terms of parental perceptions and their place in the league table.

Mr Wood: We use a 10 per cent aptitude test, a standardised NFER test.

 

Q433  Chairman: What sort of specialism are you?

Mr Wood: Technology. I would happily drop the test tomorrow and have discussed dropping it with the local authority because we feel in a selective area it does not really make any difference. In other words, we simply are not bringing in children through that test. Whichever test you use it tends to correlate quite closely with tests for ability, so all it is doing is identifying who is going to be in the top 25 per cent who go to grammar school anyway, so we feel it is having little or no effect. Where it has been used is over the years, as we became popular and people could not get in except within a designated area, as it were, then people from further distance used the test as a possible means of entering if they were particularly interested in coming to a specialist school. As far as the improvement in results goes, I made the point earlier I think that the year we had 2 per cent we took in the brothers and sisters of those who got 2 per cent and from those we achieved 45 per cent. Beyond that point, the 45 to the 67/68 we have had in the last two years, I think there is some influence in terms of a changing intake.

 

Q434  Chairman: But did you introduce the 40/40/20 at that time? Was that your school or another?

Mr Wood: No.

Mr Jones: That was mine.

 

Q435  Chairman: So, Mr Wood, you do not do anything like that?

Mr Wood: No. I am not quite sure what it is!

 

Q436  Chairman: But you do the 10 per cent. You cannot tell the difference between ability and aptitude?

Mr Wood: I think it is extremely difficult. It is very difficult to find anyone who will say they can give you a cast iron test which will demonstrate an aptitude for technology. We have tried to keep away from any test which required verbal ability - in other words, we tried to move towards non verbal tests. Earlier in the whole exercise we used a different approach which was far more based on an individual interview; then we were advised that that was not terribly objective. We felt that produced a more interesting spread of children, and we used to show them a video and get them to look at the problems of the elderly in terms of, say, opening tins and then show them a tin opener and say, "Tell us how you would re-design that", and you got some very interesting responses from ten-year-olds, and then we were told, "Well, no, you must not do that; you must go to an objective test, because otherwise there might be some serious questions", and we feel now what we are simply measuring, one way and another, is intelligence.

 

Q437  Chairman: So you do not interview now?

Mr Wood: No.

Mrs Laycock: I do not interview at all.

 

Q438  Chairman: Now, Mr Jones, you are the 40/40/20 school?

Mr Jones: That is right, we re-introduced banding into the school. You remember that the ILEA used to select for secondary schools on the basis of banding and when the ILEA disappeared in a lot of London boroughs, including Lambeth, the banding went out of the window with the result that our school very quickly became heavily skewed towards the lower ability end, and it was comprehensive in name only. It really was a secondary modern school, if I can put it crudely. After a lot of deliberation we decided that the best thing to do, in order to try and achieve a balanced intake, was to move towards a banding system. We had to get the permission of the then Secretary of State, Gillian Shepherd, and that was not easy to get but eventually we got it, and what we do now is pre test the youngsters with a standard NFER test, a CAT test, which tests verbal, non verbal and numeracy, and at the end of the day we get a standard assessment score which enables us to place the children in one of three bands, Band 1 being above average, 2 average, and Band 3 being below average. If we are, and we have been every year, over-subscribed in each of these then as a church school various church qualifications come in, and those children who attend church regularly get priority over other children.

 

Q439  Chairman: How do you know that?

Mr Jones: If they wish to get priority because they are bona fide worshippers we ask them to submit a form from their clergyman, their minister or their pastor commenting on their attendance and whether, in fact, they would benefit from an education in an Anglican school.

 

Q440  Jeff Ennis: For completeness, could I ask Mr Jones what percentage of pupils are on free school meals?

Mr Jones: It has gone down in recent years but it is somewhere around 40 per cent.

 

Q441  Jeff Ennis: Do our witnesses accept the need for admissions to be co-ordinated in areas and, if so, who is best placed to achieve that sort of co-ordination?

Mrs Laycock: We think there is the need for co-ordination of admissions and I believe the party best placed to do so with complete objectivity is the Local Education Authority, but I believe this is a particularly difficult problem for all of you because, if you were going to start again, you would not start with what we have. Historically we have major issues to shift if we are ever going to get any kind of equality on the issue around admissions, because it is so very clearly linked in terms of parental preferencing to the league table, which I think is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mr Wood: I would agree that the Local Education Authority is the correct body. In Kent in a selective system, however, it is extraordinarily difficult to get a totally fair system. My concern is for parents: I have no doubt you have perhaps seen or I know you have spoken to the adjudicator. There has been a recent adjudication in Kent, and I would be interested to know what level of intelligence you require or even reading ability to be able to understand it. It is very logical and I understand entirely why the decisions have been taken, but I sympathise totally with the parent. This happens very frequently: somewhere well into double figures within the last ten days of parents have asked for clarification, asking, "If I put this school first and I do not get a place what will happen?" It is not easy, particularly when you are in an oversubscribed school as I am and you, as a parent, are also attempting to get your child into a grammar school.

Mr Jones: I certainly do think that there should be some sort of co-ordination of the system. I would have considerable reservations about the local authority doing it, and the sort of co-ordination that I am talking about is the sort of co-ordination that you have got with UCAS, the universities' clearing house, where the forms are all sent and channelled through but the individual universities and colleges decide who they will offer places to. That is something that I think is desperately needed. You have a crazy situation in Lambeth, as I outlined in my paper, where four other schools in my borough test the children for banding, as do some of the surrounding local authorities and some of their schools do it as well and Wandsworth does it in its entirety, and you can have a crazy situation where one child over a short period of time can take the test two or three times. That is not at all fair on the children or the parents. So I have been arguing for one test to be taken in the comfort and the security of their existing primary schools so that that result can then be fed into those schools that want to use a banding system. You have also got the advantage that at the end of the day, if all the choices go back to the clearing house, then one choice will be emerging; the parents will be offered one place; and it will stop the nonsense that you have at the moment where some parents have several places and some children have none at all, and that again is not fair. It does also present problems for the receiving school: sometimes the receiving school only finds out fairly late in the day that a parent has changed their minds and their child is going to another school, and if that happens in September you could be left with an empty desk in a classroom in year 7, which is not good.

 

Q442  Jeff Ennis: Are you saying it should not be the Local Education Authority because of the London scenario, and because you have so many LEAs cheek by jowl with each other?

Mr Jones: Yes, I think you have got that. You do need a pan London solution or a cluster of local authorities because there is an awful lot of cross-border movement. You have a lot of children going from Lambeth to surrounding areas, particularly Wandsworth, and we get a lot of children coming in from Southwark, so I do think there needs to be some sort of cross-borough co-ordination. I do not honestly think that the local authorities are equipped to be able to do that.

 

Q443  Jeff Ennis: There is the experiment with the pan London admissions scheme. Is that going to succeed, in your opinion, or is it going to have major problems?

Mr Jones: There are certainly going to be teething problems and certainly in the summer term when I was active I do not think they had got the software because you are going to need software to be able to administer it. If they have everything in place then fine, it should work because it seems quite a simple thing to do, and they can certainly learn lessons from UCAS, but knowing the way the London boroughs operate there will be a lot of teething problems. Watch this space!

Q444  Jeff Ennis: Obviously the new code of practice has not been in place that long. How has it impacted on your admissions policies? Does it need to be beefed up or relaxed?

Mr Wood: I do not think it has seriously impacted yet. For instance, we simply paid no attention to the issue of children in care before. The number in care at my school in the last year was only four - I have checked up on that before I came. We do not know, now that the adjudicator has said it must be top of the list, whether that will increase. I have mentioned that the number of children with statements is about 55 in the whole school, that is around ten per year which is quite high compared with other non selective local schools, and perhaps indicates the fact that we are popular, but there has been no major significance as yet in terms of numbers.

Mrs Laycock: I think it is too early to say as well. I would support the fact that there is a one choice being made by parents now and I think I can say from my knowledge of the four primary schools with whom we work very closely that, again, the majority of students from those schools will be coming to my school and the last two years, if they put another school first and have not got in, they have assumed from previous practice they would be able to get into Firth Park and that has not been the case, and the community has learned by that. In relation to child protection, looked-after children, interestingly I have just looked at some statistics and we have 9.8 per cent of Sheffield city's most at-risk children in our school, higher than any other school. I would support the fact that those students need to be helped and directed into a school where they are going to be, hopefully, given a good education and helped to move beyond the problems they currently face.

 

Q445  Jonathan Shaw: Can I ask you about a matter you mentioned to the Committee in your opening statement about receiving children who were extremely turbulent and disruptive when you had available places? In our briefing papers we were given an article written about Jill Clough who was the head teacher in East Brighton --

Mrs Laycock: I know her.

Q446  Jonathan Shaw: -- and what you were describing sounded very similar to that which happened in Brighton, although I think perhaps Brighton were not as fortunate in terms of the amount of resources and the excellence in cities, etc, that your school has. You have praised your Local Education Authority. Can you describe some of the tensions when that was happening on a frequent basis?

Mrs Laycock: When I first went to the school there were 940 students there - there are now 1365 and we are full with waiting lists - but for three or four years we had places and Sheffield, as I have described, is an area of considerable socio economic divisions and quite a number of difficulties in terms of turbulent families in a whole variety of ways plus the refugees and asylum seeker issues, although actually those children are the most aspirant. But, yes, we were told - first of all, asked - to take children who had been permanently excluded from other schools or who were in difficulty or from at-risk families, but you have to look at your critical mass numbers in your schools of the children working with you and those that are in similar difficulties or more extreme difficulties, so I did put up a big fight with a Local Education Authority on many occasions and, to be fair, they always listened, and on occasions they did support me and try and get that child into another school. But OFSTED and HMI are picking up on turbulence being a problematic feature of certain schools and, as David Miliband states, success in school is related to socio economic circumstances, so it was very difficult. I would say as a local area we grow our own difficult students. I have some very challenging students and very low parental expectations, and children that do not go to school being able to read or write their name and, in some cases at five, not able to use a knife and fork properly, so the whole issue about challenging students is alive and well within my school without having to be given extras. I did maintain good relationships, however, with the local authority throughout that. Interestingly, I did a little bit of local research before coming here and Abbeydale Grange in Sheffield is now a sink school at one side of the city, and that head teacher has taken 38 students into his school since September - all difficult students.

Q447  Jonathan Shaw: Mr Jones, you say you are a comprehensive only in name, to paraphrase?

Mr Jones: Initially, yes.

 

Q448  Jonathan Shaw: Mr Wood, is your school a secondary modern only in name in terms of the in-take?

Mr Wood: What we described in terms of the intake, no. Just to partially comment on your question, under the system until this year, when parents will know the 11-plus result, we have had all applicants to us and know that, for instance, up to 40 per cent of our intake has disappeared. It is 25 per cent across the whole area but 40 per cent of those would be attempting to get into my school. We are producing results which sit comfortably with the rest of the country in terms of comprehensive education but we are missing quite a significant proportion of the brightest children.

 

Q449  Jonathan Shaw: One of the questions that the Chairman asked was, as your school has improved, what has the impact been on the other secondary schools within the area?

Mr Wood: There are two schools within perhaps three miles of us. One of those has just come out of special measures; one has just over 20 per cent 5 As - Cs this year. They are both around the 500 pupil mark. The local authority has decided with the co-operation of our governing body and the other two schools' governing bodies to attempt to work the three schools in a federation which began unofficially at Easter and will be formally designated when it is possible to do that under the present legislation.

 

Q450  Jonathan Shaw: So these three schools are coming together?

Mr Wood: Yes. That is looked at as the potential way forward now. It is very difficult to assess the effect of one school's success against two other local schools in that situation, but I would be misinterpreting the facts if I suggested that our success has not inhibited other schools. I believe it has, yes.

 

Q451  Jonathan Shaw: What is the solution?

Mr Wood: I hope the solution is in the federal idea but, in a sense, there is no answer to your question because, as long as there is a thing called parental preference, no one can impose a solution if parents choose to go in particular directions.

 

Q452  Mr Turner: Could I start with you, Mrs Laycock, only because you have used a particular couple of phrases in your paper. Firstly you refer to the "comprehensive ideal" and elsewhere you say, "this is not comprehensive education in relation to the ideal and equanimity". What is the "comprehensive ideal"?

Mrs Laycock: I think the comprehensive ideal is that every child in secondary education is entitled to a good education such that they leave having fulfilled their potential, being able to move on to further, higher education if they have the aptitude for that, or into the world of work with the self confidence and self esteem to know that they are a positive, valued citizen and someone who is going to make a difference to society. The situation we currently have is not an ideal one and I have said so in my paper, which you have read.

 

Q453  Mr Turner: So effectively you are saying that some schools, given their intake, are incapable of delivering that entitlement?

Mrs Laycock: I am saying that some schools have more difficulty in delivering that entitlement by the very nature of the students that attend that school, and I would suggest that within Sheffield, and I have put this in my paper, there are 27 secondary schools and they go very easily into three gropus of nine - the most affluent advantaged top of the league table, the middle of the road schools, of which I was an acting head of one at one point, and the nine inner city schools. Now in relation to the nine inner city schools, all of whom have had heads appointed in the last 6-8 years, those are progressing and achieving two or three times above the national average, and the pattern of what we are doing is therefore changing in Sheffield. So I am not saying it is impossible; I am saying it is more challenging, more difficult, and I might also say, to be honest, that there are some schools coasting with an intake where it is not easy because all young people can be difficult, but if you have a critical mass of aspirant young people from good homes and parents who want them to succeed then the outcome is not too surprising.

 

Q454  Mr Turner: But your remedy, essentially, is to change the pupils?

Mrs Laycock: If I were starting again I would say to you that every school should have a normal curve of distribution of ability levels in every single comprehensive school, and selection should not take place at 11 and the Local Education Authority ought to manage that process through the data they have of students in the primary schools. So if every school had a normal distribution of the ability range, then indeed we would really be looking at prior attainment and how that school adds value to those students from the age of 11 in terms of outturns at key stages 3 and 4.

 

Q455  Mr Turner: And you are talking about the national normal distribution curve being replicated in every individual school?

Mrs Laycock: Yes, which is not possible.

Mr Turner: I think we have identified, not only today but over previous days, a number of problems and evils, if you like, in the current system - multiple offers, turbulence particularly for schools that are not full, the first choice lottery, and maybe others. What are the three key evils you all believe should be corrected in the current admission system?

 

Q456  Chairman: Did you say "evils"? That is interesting terminology but I am sure our heads can deal with it!

Mr Jones: Given that in this country parents have always got to be allowed to express a preference for a school, when they are given the opportunity to express more than one preference that is when the problems start to arise, so I think there is sometimes too much choice, and that choice needs to be co-ordinated, if you like, by what I have suggested earlier on - some sort of clearing house. The other evil is that with a large number of schools prepared to choose, each school having its own admissions policy - and I have nothing against that - it does mean certainly in my locality that parents might end up having to fill in half a dozen application forms, and that is wasteful. I think there should be some coming together of the various admissions authorities to produce a common application form in the same way that UCAS has done. I do not think it is beyond the wit of man and I am quite sure that, if the churches are spoken to nicely, they would come along. The other evil is the multiplicity of different dates for offering a place to a parent. Certainly as far as London is concerned, there should be one date and, as far as possible, on that particular date every single child should be in possession of a place offer.

Mr Wood: I would stress what I said earlier about the needs of parents. I feel that the system at the moment is extraordinarily confusing for them and all moves should be made to try and make sure the information they get is simple, straightforward and timely. The position of Kent this year was that the final adjudication was received on 31 October; I would question whether it is not possible to have some kind of cut-off date so all the arguments can be kept away from that parental decision-making process because that seems to be unfair to me. What has not been raised is my concern that a few parents, where they end up perhaps trying to work the system and sending their child to a school which is not the nearest designated one for free transport, can suddenly find themselves with quite significant bills. I tried to take an average situation at my own school and the person who organises transport said, "Yes, £2.50 a day for 200 days a year". That is £500 per child if you do not end up in the school that the Local Education Authority has designated gives you free transport. If you have three children, it does not take long to work out that, over that lifetime which is still secondary education, that is many thousands of pounds and I do not think we make any allowance for that enormous burden on some parents.

Mrs Laycock: The biggest evil is the league table because the league table means that parents right across any city are going to try and get their child into the school that is at the top or near the top of the league table. Making one choice now or one preference is perhaps going to help that although it is too early to say, but even so I know there will be parents in Sheffield trying to get their children into the school at the top of the league table and, if they fail, the whole process of appeals and the vagaries of that are skewed towards middle-class, aspirant articulate parents, so it does not address issues of equality at all.

 

Q457  Mr Chaytor: Could I start by asking Mr Jones about the reference to UCAS, because you argued that the admissions process should be co-ordinated in a way similar to university applications but that means you are arguing against parental choice, does it not?

Mr Jones: No.

 

Q458  Mr Chaytor: But in the UCAS system it is the universities that choose the students, not the other way round.

Mr Jones: Yes, but if the school is oversubscribed then the school has to decide which of those children it will accept, and it will have an admissions policy and obviously some parents who fulfil a certain criteria in the admissions policy are going to get priority over others.

 

Q459  Mr Chaytor: On the question of individual schools being their own admissions authorities, do you accept that in itself is a denial of parental choice?

Mr Jones: No, I do not.

Q460  Mr Chaytor: But how can it not be? If I live in the catchment area of the London Oratory my child cannot go to the London Oratory because I am not Catholic, so surely it is the school choosing and not the parent?

Mr Jones: Faith schools are slightly different. As an Anglican school we obviously give priority to Anglican children.

 

Q461  Mr Chaytor: So that is a denial of parental choice to all parents?

Mr Jones: Well, no. If parents want to get a place in an Anglican school then the solution is there for them when they start going to a Church of England church.

 

Q462  Mr Chaytor: But let us pursue this. How do you explain the fact that there are more children in Anglican schools between Monday and Friday than there are children in Anglican churches on Sunday?

Mr Jones: Simply because not all of the children that we have in my school are Anglicans but Anglicans do, in fact, get top priority and then the next tier down are bona fide worshippers of other Christian denominations.

 

Q463  Mr Chaytor: But it is still a denial of parental choice; that is what I am trying to tease out. Do we have a system of parental choice? Are you arguing for that?

Mr Jones: What I am arguing for is obviously that parents have got to have a right to express a preference. We have 92 places every year; we get 3-400 people applying; there are going to be parents disappointed. The only way round that would perhaps be to enlarge the school, which is physically impossible.

 

Q464  Mr Chaytor: But is there a case - and presumably you think there is but I am interested in finding out what the case is - for the individual school deciding on the oversubscription criteria, rather than the Local Education Authority doing it by lottery, for instance?

Mr Jones: If I can stick with the church sector because that is the sector I know most about, each church school will have its own different ethos and in order to maintain that ethos I think you have to have parents and youngsters committed to supporting that ethos, and it is only right and proper that that is reflected in the admissions policy.

 

Q465  Mr Chaytor: But the difficulty is that with church schools overall, and I am not referring to yours, part of the ethos is that there are fewer members of children on free school meals and fewer children with statements. Is this coincidence or is this part of the ethos of Anglican and Catholic schools?

Mr Jones: I really would not want to speak for the Anglican church and I certainly would not want to speak for the Roman Catholics but, as far as my own school is concerned, we do get a very broad spread across the socio economic gropus. If you were to push me I would say that perhaps we are not truly representative in ethnic terms of the local population because far more black children in south east London go to church than white children, so they obviously get priority and this is obviously reflected in the ethnic profile of the school.

 

Q466  Mr Chaytor: Moving on to the issue that each of you have raised in your opening presentation, the impact of league tables, do you think that league tables as currently constituted are primarily a measure of school achievements or a measure of school intake?

Mrs Laycock: I believe that school league tables in general tell you where a child lives, and it is catchment of the school. I do not believe that school league tables tell you very much about teaching and learning in that school. My eldest son who has just completed a politics degree and is working in London went to the school in Sheffield at the top of the league table and left with nine A* and As and five As in his 'A' level but he would say the only people in that school that knew him and really engaged with him were the PE Department because he was also good at sport but he was with a hugely critical group. Those children I knew from being tiny and they all know they would go to university and all knew they would be successful. I believe testing and accountability is very important and I want to continue with that, but I think the league table is destructive and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Adding value and looking at how children progress on entry to that school is the way forward. If I can cite some examples of refugees and asylum seekers in my school who come in years 7 and 8 with no English at all and achieve, as they did last year, many of them A* to C but some a whole range of Ds and Es, that is incredible added value but it does not show up in the league table to my school. They have done that in three or four years whereas everybody else did it in eleven years.

Mr Wood: I do not think there is any simple answer to this question. I fully respect what you have just been told about the influence of the league tables. On the other hand, if I go back to 1989 and see that 2 per cent of the children at my school were identified in the lists in the local newspapers as getting five As - Cs, I find myself turning to staff and saying, "We cannot any longer use the excuse of selection". Even if we do use it and say that 25 per cent of the local population have been selected we are getting appallingly poor results for people in the top 30 per cent of the ability range if you follow my argument, and 5 per cent would be with us and we are simply failing them, so that numerical evidence, whether published in league tables or not I question, has been extremely useful to us. However, when it did not suit my purposes several years ago, when in fact it seemed to me that the numbers were suggesting that we would not do quite as well as I thought we should, I am afraid I binned the numbers and said, "We are going to do better" and we did, because some of it is motivation of teachers and motivation of students. This is an extraordinarily difficult area and simple answers are probably wrong answers. Now, if one attempted to get rid of the league tables or did what some are suggesting and have area league tables, parents would find ways of putting schools into the hierarchical classification which you described earlier, which is very usual in different areas. There are almost three layers of schools.

 

Q467  Mr Chaytor: But would you say that had there been a value-added league table it would have been of equal value to your purpose in driving up standards in school, or was it the accident of a raw scores league table that enabled you to make the progress you have?

Mr Wood: I feel there is far greater validity to value added league tables and had they been there from the beginning - and I appreciate they could not have been; we just did not understand how to do that ten years ago - they would have been very useful and as they are slowly being introduced I am very interested in their usefulness. What is slightly worrying me is that there are already arguments about whether one value added table is better than someone else's, and that is getting rather silly.

 

Q468  Mr Chaytor: On the question of the catchment area, you have each touched on the issue of parents moving their children across conurbations and large distances. Do you think there is a positive value in doing that or is there a positive value in having children able to go to their nearest school? What should be the objective of policy? Should it maximise choice to the extent that it encourages people to travel large distances, or should it encourage parents to have confidence in their local school?

Mrs Laycock: Children should go to their local comprehensive school, and that is where they should go. If all the kids in my community came to us then they would be welcome but it would still not give me the normal distribution curve. I then think the government has to look at how the schools are funded and recognise that we are not on an even playing field, so where there is a skewed ability downwards or whether there are socio economic circumstances, whether they use free school meals which is a rather blunt tool or whatever, there has to be some differentiation after that. I do not believe it is good for students to go and, indeed, it can be quite damaging sometimes. We have had kids who have come back to us who have got in at the other end of the city and culturally they have not coped very well. There are differences in expectations and in values. Mine is an area which is virtually all council house, and if our students are moving to the other end of the city where the values are different they do not sometimes even fit in and they come back - either by their own choice or sometimes because they have been kicked out.

Mr Wood: My answer is a rather cynical one. Over the years we have worked with various schools on the continent and at a particular school in Germany the head I was visiting said, "What do you mean travel to school? Everyone walks or use their bicycle. It is a local school. Is that not the way everywhere?" I believe there is an obsession in England that if you tell everyone to go to their local school, which used to be the case really until the law changed in the 80s, then a proportion of the population begins to be obsessed by the fact that the grass is greener on the other side, and I genuinely do not know how to overcome that. I see that as an ideal solution; it clearly works in Germany, but I no longer believe that would be tolerated by the local populations in England.

Mr Jones: I am looking at it from an inner city perspective where you have a huge choice of schools, and I do wonder sometimes, when people ask me what my community is, what that community is. We are the only boys church school in the fairly wide catchment area, boys are going to drive past other secondary schools to come to mine, and I think that will probably always be the case as far as the church sector is concerned.

 

Q469  Helen Jones: All three of you have taken over schools that were in difficult circumstances and what interests us as a Committee is you have tackled that problem in very different ways, so I want to try and tease out something about your admissions process, if I may. I would be right in saying, would I, that you, Mr Jones and Mr Wood, represent schools where the intake has changed fairly substantially since you took over?

Mr Jones: I do not know if I would use the word "substantially" but there has been a considerable change in the intake and we are moving towards a more balanced academic intake. We are not there yet but we are moving towards it. It is not something where you bring in a new admissions policy and you think things are going to change - they do not. It plays only a small part, if you like, in raising and changing perceptions and raising achievements - an important but small part.

 

Q470  Helen Jones: Do you still interview parents, Mr Jones?

Mr Jones: Only after we have offered them a place. We do not interview them prior to offering them a place.

 

Q471  Helen Jones: You are a church school. I spent all my teaching career in church schools - albeit not in the Church of England - and how do you decide, if you give preference to children who are practising Anglicans, what constitutes a practising Anglican? How do you know that they are telling the truth? And how do you cater for parents who suddenly develop an interest in going to church - who are "born again"! - a year or so before their children apply to your school? I am a Catholic: you are either a baptised Catholic or you are not. Fairly simple!

Mr Jones: When we send out the pack, there is included in the pack, in addition to the prospectus, the admissions policy and the application form, what we call a "clergy form". We invite those parents who want to claim priority under this to get their clergymen to fill it in for them, and we are particularly interested in the frequency of church attendances. The governors have decided that, in order to count, they have to go to church at least once a fortnight and to have done that over a 12-month period. So, if the bright parent suddenly gets the call when the kid is in year 5 and they go regularly to church, they would then qualify; if they get the call in the middle of year 6, unless they have an accommodating vicar they probably will not qualify for priority.

 

Q472  Helen Jones: You are saying to us that under your admissions process it is quite possible for parents, if they so wish, to manipulate the system.

Mr Jones: I would say it was, yes. I think with any system you are going to get manipulation.

 

Q473  Helen Jones: I wonder, then, how you and your governors square that with your duty to look after children with special educational needs or children who are in care. And I wonder if the other heads could also tell us how they see admissions to their schools coping with that. Because you are often then dealing with people who are not in a position to manipulate the system but who nevertheless have needs which I think we would all agree ought to be catered for within a comprehensive system.

Mr Jones: You will find, if in fact you look at the profile, that we do have a number of children in care who come along. One of the reasons they choose us, although they are church-going as well, is because of the benefits that they can obtain from the pastoral care system, and we are fortunate as an Anglican school to have a full-time chaplain on the staff as well, which bolsters things. A lot of them come in under the normal criterion that they are going to church (with their foster mother or with their legal guardian) and they apply in the normal course of events, so we do get our fair share of children who perhaps would be regarded as disadvantaged.

Mr Wood: If I may take, just as the example to answer your question, the statemented pupils I mentioned earlier. In the last couple of years, since this became an issue because of the Code of Practice, when our number of statemented children was rising and they were coming, as it were, from outside our normal catchment area, the LEA have allowed us just to carry those 12 as extra pupils. I feel that is a comfortable solution, because I would worry that taking a statemented child from 10 miles away, because that is the parents' choice and the LEA has designated our school at the request of the parents, could misplace a child with enormous social deprivation for all I know. It is a very hit-and-miss system. But the way in which we have been allowed, as an oversubscribed school, simply to run over and say, "If you have 12 statemented children, you can accept 12 more," which my governors and I accepted, has made it less of a concern that someone else would be pushed over the edge and not allowed in who would previously have got a place.

 

Q474  Helen Jones: You select 10 per cent by aptitude, do you not?

Mr Wood: Yes.

 

Q475  Helen Jones: You previously said to the Committee that you do not really feel that the tests are particularly valid. How then does the admission of children with special needs or children in care fit in with your system? Do you select the 10 per cent and then you ----

Mr Wood: Forgive me, until this year, the issue of children in care did not enter into it: if they applied, we did not know that they were in care necessarily until afterwards. So I cannot comment on how that will affect things in the future, but it works approximately like this: we take in 250 children a year. Twenty-five of those would be on the aptitude test. We have a small unit for visually impaired children and they would get the next opportunity. That would never be more, I think, than a maximum of three children a year. We then move to any special medical reasons - and very rarely does anyone use that category. We then move to siblings at the school. That takes in about 40 per cent of the places. Then it begins to be more on distance.

 

Q476  Helen Jones: Could I ask Mrs Laycock. You have experienced this, if you like, from the other side of the system, where you have had to cope with a lot of children with particular special needs. How do you feel the needs of those children should be dealt with within the admissions system and how do you, as a head who has looked to raising standards in a very difficult area, feel that schools can have an open admission system which admits a lot of children with particular difficulties and still raise standards?

Mrs Laycock: I go back to what I said earlier, and that is that I do believe children from the local community should go to their community school. That will bring to my school a higher number of challenging students and children with special needs by dint of its actual area, but I am actually happy to accommodate those in the first place. If we were looking at an ideal, I would say - and I have said this as chair of secondary heads in Sheffield - that I believe all 27 of us are jointly responsible for the education of all secondary age children in our city. Therefore, the problem that you have with the current situation in relation to admissions and movement of students after the age of 11, is that if schools are full they do not have to take those students, and so if schools have places they take a disproportionate number. As I mention in my paper, what we are trying to do in Sheffield - and I do not know whether we will be successful, but case law allows it - is to look at a brokerage arrangement, dependent on school size - if it is a small school of 800, it would allow them to go over two or three places; mine, a bigger school, five or six - so that there was a real sharing of the problems of those young people but also the potential, because they all do have potential, and it is down to, in the end, a critical mass issue. But at the level of when they enter your school aged 11, if they come in having preferenced your school and want to come there, then I think that is a positive decision and that we there have a responsibility to educate them and help them achieve.

 

Q477  Helen Jones: You have raised quite an important point, which I think is one I would share, that all the heads in the area have joint responsibility for the education of children in that area. I would like to hear from our other two witnesses, if I may, how they think that should be dealt with. Is there a community responsibility as well as a responsibility to your particular school? If so, what changes would both of you like to see in the admissions system that would cater for that? Or do you think a head's duty is simply to their particular school?

Mr Wood: I think my view is changing. As a former GM head, I was keen to have independence in order to improve the lot of the children in my own school. I now see some of the long-term effects which have resulted in that hierarchical set-up which you describe, and I believe we have now to move more to a wider responsibility. That is a very easy thing to say and very difficult to put into practice. On a day-to-day basis, if you have a child in my school, you would expect my concentration to be on the education of your son or daughter and not worrying about what is happening on the other side of the town. So there is a real tension in schools. However, many of the moves that are now being made towards collaboration and the federation, which I described earlier, I think are beginning to show signs of alleviating some of the excesses, and we will begin to tackle some of the issues about, for instance, difficult to place children all ending up in the one school. It is difficult to take that to any kind of natural conclusion, though, in terms of one's community responsibility in an area which has selection, because how can you define that issue of my being responsible for the education of children in a local community when a significant proportion of them will be taken out of the local community at the wishes of the local population.

 

Q478  Helen Jones: Do you believe that hinders an efficient education system, the fact that you still have selection?

Mr Wood: Yes.

 

Q479  Helen Jones: Mr Jones, I wonder what your view is on this, coming from a church school.

Mr Jones: We have always taken the view that the pupils in our school and their families are entitled to our first priority but we have never walked on the other side of the road when our neighbour is in trouble. We have offered, from time to time, our specialist knowledge and help to local schools when they have been in difficulty or if we have some specialism that they do not have. We certainly cooperate with three other schools now at sixth form level. It is not just the secondary sector either; we have very good links with our primary schools as well. We have a very good art department and we frequently invite children in from the local primary school, boys and girls - we are a boys school - to come in to get some specialist tuition, and to be able to use our equipment which they would not otherwise have the opportunity of doing at the primary stage.

Q480  Helen Jones: Could you comment particularly on the secondary admissions on that, Mr Jones. I would be interested in your view, from a church school. How do you balance maintaining the ethos of a church school with a duty to the education of children in the wider community?

Mr Jones: I think we have to do what is practical and reasonable. I think there is a danger that one can stretch oneself a little bit too far. As I said, my priority as head was always to the boys and their families in the widest possible sense, but if we had any slack in the system then we could make that available to the wider community.

 

Q481  Helen Jones: One final question, if I may. We constantly talk about parental choice. In fact it is parental preference, not parental choice. Do you think the current system actually misleads parents, in that many of them in fact do not get their choice of school, the school gets its choice of pupils?

Mrs Laycock: In my school, the children who opt to come - parents' preference, choice, whatever you put - get in generally.

Mr Wood: As we as heads complain and get in touch with the local authority and the excellent administrator of admissions in Kent, she would maintain that, in the end, the vast majority of parents get what they want. I must concede that.

Mr Jones: I think when parents come in to visit one's school, one has to be up front and explain exactly the admissions criteria: who gets priority, what they need to do to get that priority. If they do express a preference for the school, I think you have to give some indication as to how likely they are to be successful.

 

Q482  Valerie Davey: Has the Greenwich judgment had any impact on your guidance or your situation now? It caused a huge furore initially. Is it still of influence?

Mr Jones: It certainly does. If you look at the whole pattern of migration in inner London you will find that there are the big players, like, for example, Wandsworth, who take an awful lot of children in. They are mass importers. As is Bromley, where I live. There are always horror stories of children who live next door to the school in Bromley who are unable to get there because you have children coming down from Greenwich. So, yes, it does have an impact. To a certain extent, I dare say that we are probably as guilty in Lambeth as the rest because we are also net importers. Although we lose a lot, we also import a lot of children from the London Borough of Southwark. So it is a problem and I do think it needs to be sorted out.

 

Q483  Valerie Davey: Out of London, does it still occasionally become a feature in your thinking, or is it not important?

Mr Wood: Not really where we are located, although I suspect - although I do not have any details - that it is probably a factor on the borders of Kent with the outer London authorities, Bromley and Bexley.

 

Q484  Valerie Davey: And Sheffield?

Mrs Laycock: It is not an issue in Sheffield. I mean, it is the Soviet Republic of South Yorkshire!

 

Q485  Valerie Davey: Indeed. But the factor that concerns me about Greenwich now, about which I would like to ask you, is who actually has the advocacy for the children of a community? Before Greenwich, the LEA had absolute prior responsibility for ensuring that every child who lived in their area got a place. Now who do you see as the advocate for the children? Your local community? Your LEA? Who is really responsible now ultimately that every child gets a place?

Mr Jones: I think that responsibility still devolves upon the local education authority where the child lives. They have a legal responsibility for that particular child.

 

Q486  Valerie Davey: But it is virtually impossible.

Mr Jones: It is very, very difficult, yes.

Mr Wood: In practice, I would agree, that is where the responsibility lies and the local authority in Kent clearly take that responsibility very seriously.

Mrs Laycock: In Sheffield it is the local authority. Indeed, for the last two years we have also had what we call a "bulge year", of larger numbers of students coming in at aged 11, and we have worked as 27 heads to look at how those could be accommodated in schools that are generally full. We have not allowed - and it has not been an issue - that the schools in more advantaged areas have been able to take in more, thus therefore there being an expectation they will continue to do so. Quite the reverse has taken place, and that has happened quite collegiately.

 

Q487  Valerie Davey: We have a complex system of school admission policies; the new framework, clearly - which will be significant; LEAs; and parents exercising a preference but uncertain in most cases, in many cases, as to where they are actually going to be. You are three very experienced heads, and the relative length of time you have been at those schools and the way you have brought them forward is, I think, a lesson to all of us. You have done that, you have been encouraging parental choice for your schools and now suddenly they are full. And that is the ultimate problem, where you have oversubscribed schools. Do you not feel that you have changed your character now, that you are now selecting as opposed to encouraging those parents to select you?

Mrs Laycock: As I said earlier, the students from my local community do come to my school, and, in looking at demographics over the next few years, they will continue to do so. I do not think Firth Park is ever going to be oversubscribed to the point where they are fighting at the door to get in.

 

Q488  Valerie Davey: You are comfortable.

Mrs Laycock: I am comfortable. It would be nice, before I leave there, if they were actually advertising houses - they do not at the moment - for sale "in the catchment of Firth Park Community Arts College".

Mr Wood: With 55 statemented pupils, almost 300 special needs pupils, I do not think I could agree with you - although the proportions in other schools local to me will be greater than that.

Mr Jones: It grieves me every year that we are not able to offer places to youngsters who I think would thrive and benefit from the offer that we have in Tenison's, but we are just simply bulging at the seams. It is sad. It is also sad that there are not other schools like ours in the immediate locality.

 

Q489  Valerie Davey: That means boys' schools.

Mr Jones: Yes.

 

Q490  Mr Pollard: Can I tell you, as a practising Roman Catholic, that you have to go to church twice a week now to get into a Catholic school. My belief is that it will be daily mass before long!

Mr Jones: I am glad to hear it!

 

Q491  Chairman: It depends on the number of children you have.

Mrs Laycock: As a lapsed Catholic who was locked up in convent school until I was 18, I can assure you that was the case.

 

Q492  Mr Pollard: On the number of children, I have seven children, so I qualify in every case. Is it a perception, do you believe, that church schools are stronger on discipline and that is why people are attracted to them.

Mrs Laycock: In Sheffield, I do not believe that is the case, that the two church schools are perceived to be stronger on discipline at all. Indeed, we are working with the Leadership Incentive Grant. I work in a collaborative group of six other heads from very different schools and I think the perception was that when we got into the league those at the top of the league table would shine a light towards those at the bottom and that we would all flourish and suddenly get better. Actually, people are finding out that there is more good practice in schools like mine, particularly around behaviour in management. My lead behaviour person, my assistant head, is actually working in one such "advantaged" school doing quite a lot of training.

 

Q493  Mr Pollard: I did not say the practice but that there is a perception outside ...

Mrs Laycock: Not in Sheffield, no. It is league table.

Mr Wood: I do not see that at the one church school in Maidstone. My former post, albeit many years ago, was as the deputy head of a church school, the first joint church school in Surrey, which was Anglican and Roman Catholic. I think parents wanted that school for the positive ethos that they felt was there, however I think that they would have forgotten the positive ethos if we had not been improving results.

Mr Jones: I think a very, very small section of our community thinks that we are, sort of, "hot" on discipline. The vast majority like the ethos, like what we have to offer. We do sell this when they come around on open days, and we do stress the fact that we come together as a school each day for an assembly and that we also have, as I mentioned earlier, the chaplain. We do not just take on boys, we take on families. I think it is the whole package that they sign up for.

 

Q494  Mr Pollard: Does competition between schools and different types of schools raise standards?

Mrs Laycock: I think that ----

 

Q495  Mr Pollard: From the Socialist Republic of Sheffield.

Mrs Laycock: I feel very strongly and passionately about raising standards. I suppose we are quite lucky in Sheffield in relation to the way we do work together. Clearly, I do think that competition, looking at what is happening in your neighbouring schools or across the way, does focus the mind clearly. The night before the GCSE results come out, I do not sleep - and I play with data and so on and so forth! So, yes, of course it does. I do not think that is unhealthy either, I just think that the way those results are published is unhealthy.

 

Q496  Chairman: Is there not an aspect, a kind of sub-theme to your argument, that because you are running a school in a working-class area that the kids are inherently less able than the kids across in the middle-class parts of Sheffield that you described earlier?

Mrs Laycock: It depends on how you define ability and how you test that. If you look at the ability range as they come in, in terms of Key Stage 2 SATs they are lower than other parts of the city. That is not just to do with those schools, that is parenting, that is expectations, that is lifestyle, et cetera. Therefore, it is my job, it is our job, to follow on the very good work of the primary schools and raise those expectations and those outcomes. I actually believe, and I say to my kids: Success in life is about 10 per cent intelligence and 90 per cent bottle and determination and self-belief. That is what we are trying to do. All around my school there are posters - I am an ex-head of art - saying "Firth Park is Fantastic" and they believe in it now. We are actually changing the culture. When the HMI came in last year, they said that a parent had said, "Students' self-belief rises when they come to Firth Park" and that is what we are about.

 

Q497  Chairman: You keep coming back to the theme that it is league tables. It is not reputation, it is not good behaviour of your pupils or the fact that in some schools they wear uniform; it is other things. You keep coming back to the fact that the only thing that would attract parents to send their children to a school is the league tables.

Mrs Laycock: I think the league table is a hugely significant factor on parental choice. I do lose children from my community, who to go the other end of the city, or try to, because of the league table. It is there. It is a factor. The other things we are trying to do as a school - in relation to the community, the reputation, working with parents and students - have brought a lot of them back but that has been a hard-won struggle. I continue to say that the league table is unhelpful because, no matter how hard parents believe in our school, I am not going to ever get 84 per cent (which is the top of the league table in Sheffield) at five A*-C on our current ability intake.

Chairman: Kerry, I am sorry, I cut across your questioning.

Mr Pollard: That is all right. What factors influence parents' decisions about school choice?

Helen Jones: Could we finish in relation to competition?

 

Q498  Chairman: Mike, do you want to comment?

Mr Wood: My answer on the competition point would be that I suspect competition does to an extent raise standards. We went GM in the early nineties. The key point about GM to my mind - and the resources were very important, but the real issue - was independence; that knowledge that you sat as a head in your office and realised you could not blame the LEA any more. That very sharply focused one's attention on raising standards. Otherwise, when you were in an LEA, cosy system back in the eighties, it was possible to blame other people. I think we have moved on from there now. Competition may well now be creating some problems in some schools, as we have said, and I think we have to look to other mechanisms for the future and have a greater sense of responsibility for pupils across the whole community, and that may manifest itself in a variety of ways. It may be that heads are cooperating, it may be that there are formal federations and so on.

 

Q499  Chairman: Mike, competition for you is unfair, is it not? You start at the very beginning in a race where you are shackled, because in a selective system like Kent there are schools that have a totally different basis of entry and you are going to find it very difficult to compete with them, are you not? It is inherently unfair competition for you, is it not?

Mr Wood: My answer to that is that I have four children and I do not live in Kent, and all of my children have been at comprehensive schools. So, yes, is the answer.

 

Q500  Chairman: The answer is yes. Okay.

Mr Wood: There has to be a recognition by secondary schools that we are in a market place and obviously the league tables do influence parents' choice. We found that out when we got the one per cent in 1996: it was the devil's own job to attract parents with motivated, bright kids, into the school. We did it, over a period of years. It is also the cascading effect that it has, not just on the head but also on the heads of departments and the subject teachers, because each year now you have the examination results, they are analysed pretty well, and you can actually put somebody on the spot who perhaps is not coming up to spec vis-a-vis what you would expect of them within the context of your own school. I would say, yes, to a certain extent it does have an effect on raising standards, as far as GCSE results are concerned.

 

Q501  Chairman: Brian, to you too: you have a system in London where talented youngsters are creamed off in terms of moving across London to grammar schools. Do you find that unfair competition?

Mr Jones: Yes, you still get a number of children from Lambeth which you lose when you really want them - and they go off to St Olav's, a highly selective boys' grammar school down in Bromley. We also have on the doorstep a number of very, very good independent schools. We have in the past lost children to those schools. As a result of the abolition of the assisted places scheme, we have managed to pick up a small number of children, who in the past, if the bursaries were available, would have gone to an independent school. They are not going to an independent school, they are coming to my school, and they are thriving.

Q502  Chairman: Brian, could I press you and our other heads on this. We had three academics sitting where you are sitting, from very different universities, and we pushed them on the question of whether a selective education system delivers a better education across the board for all the pupils in an area or not. What is the effect of selection in your view for all the pupils? - not just the pupils who go to your school, but across the piece.

Mr Jones: I have to put my hands up and confess, because I do not want to be called a hypocrite, that both of my children went to highly selective schools, so I am very much in favour of selective schools. Having said that, what I wanted for my own children I want for the parents who send them to my school. We certainly have, I think, managed to do that. This year alone we had two boys get places in UCL and another youngster get a place in King's to study medicine. What does worry me slightly, if I am being frank, is that those very able youngsters are not able to meet with a large catchment of equally bright youngsters. They are limited in this extent. You can have four or five very able children in a year, and obviously they will mix with one another, they will be in the same class, but, if my instincts were leading me, I think I would much prefer them to be in a much larger group so that they would get the benefit of the input from other equally bright children.

Mr Wood: I do not approve of selection, as my comment about my own children's education illustrates. I think it does have an unfortunate knock-on effect in particular areas and leads to this hierarchical arrangement of schools. I also think one of the features of it in Kent - and I am not sure whether this is replicated elsewhere, in other selective areas - is that you end u p with smaller schools, and in some cases that can actually be a disadvantage to pupils because you cannot offer the breadth of curriculum. You can get that the local community is too small to get a good balance within a school and I think that may be an effect of selection.

Mrs Laycock: I do not believe in selection at all. I think all it does is produce sink schools, who get headlines to say that they are rubbish schools and the kids in it them think they are rubbish. When I first went to Firth Park, the kids and the parents thought it was a rubbish school and they do not now. I just do not believe in that. I take on board the issues about critical mass of aspirant attaining young people - and that, I think, takes me back to how the distribution of young people should go into schools across the city, so that there were more opportunities for gropus of able and aspirant children to be together and for other children to see them and apply themselves to improving their attainment. An example in my school: we did get, for the first time in history of Firth Park School, a girl into Oxford three years ago. We had to work incredibly hard with her and her mother, a single parent, and her own self-belief as to whether she could actually cope, should she go, et cetera. She got in and she just got a 2:1.

Chairman: Andrew, do you want to come in on this line of questioning, because it is an area that interests you too.

 

Q503  Mr Turner: You said earlier that funding should differentiate for student ability, if I may paraphrase. I think that is very interesting. How should that funding be arranged? Brian has just mentioned the problems as that of critical mass in his school. Would you think there should be a very significant difference in the pupil funding of pupils with different abilities where there is not the bell curve in a school?

Mrs Laycock: Yes, I do believe - and I think my two colleagues here would say the same - it is much harder if you have a critical mass of young people who are low attaining and have low expectations. In a culture of all of that as well, it is much harder to move things forward. I do think the resources do need to be addressed to go into those schools. This year there has been a massive problem about school funding - and, indeed, my situation was pretty grim as well. I think the resources have to be directed to schools where there is an agreement - and there is evidence with which everybody agrees, whether it be free school meals and those on family income support or whatever - that indeed those schools deserve extra resources because they have got a harder job. I think the other way of working with it, which is what we are doing in Sheffield and which David Miliband has supported, is that all 27 secondary schools in Sheffield will have a specialism by 2006. That is another area of being able to even-up the playing field and say, "This is a good school and we have a specialism in this," without the 10 per cent selection aspect.

Mr Wood: I want to rather violently disagree with that because I think it is too simplistic. Simply giving additional money to a school does not necessarily mean it is going to improve the quality of education for the pupils. There must be more to it than that. I was at a meeting with half a dozen heads last week from different parts of the country and it suddenly became a theme that there was considerable annoyance amongst heads at the feeling that the present Government was pushing too much money through things like Excellence in Cities and League, et cetera, into schools that were failing or in difficulties, without having mechanisms actually to guarantee that that money was being effectively used. I think that is a concern. The distortion can be such that the per capita funding between my school and one down the road - which is in great difficulty, admittedly, with a far higher proportion of special needs pupils - is approximately £900 per head different. That is very, very substantial indeed.

Mr Jones: There was a considerable amount of resentment among many of the secondary heads in Lambeth at the way the finances were being distributed. We ended up with a feeling that it was in inverse proportion to success: in other words, those schools that were perceived as failing got a lot of extra money, and Lord knows why they got the money, whereas those schools which were succeeding would probably have done even better, given the same sort of funding that you had given the so-called failing schools, and that was not fair. But the system in Lambeth was never, ever transparent.

 

Q504  Mr Chaytor: Does each of you think it would be necessary for the Government to intervene to such an extent and allocate such a large share of the budget to schools that are in difficulties, if the proportion of children were more equally distributed between all schools?

Mrs Laycock: I do not think there would be the necessity then to differentiate in that way because there would be a level playing field and therefore that intervention would not be necessary. I would have to agree, as a school that has been on the receiving end of considerable resources, that the accountability is very important as well. But I would still argue it was very necessary and continues to be necessary.

Mr Wood: If there was a more even spread of pupils, your point is correct, and I accept it entirely.

 

Q505  Mr Chaytor: It would be cheaper to improve quality -----

Mrs Laycock: In the long-run, yes.

 

Q506  Mr Chaytor: -- by having a fairer distribution of pupils than to intervene retrospectively, after the event.

Mr Wood: Yes, I certainly think so. I am still concerned, though, about that point I made earlier regarding independence and motivation and leadership of head teachers, because just spreading out the children evenly does not necessarily make for a good education.

Mr Jones: It is good counsel for perfection.

Chairman: We are moving to the end of this session. We have kept you a long time and I am very grateful to you. Jonathan has another question.

 

Q507  Jonathan Shaw: I just want to ask you about change in the climate. You have all been experienced head teachers, and there is so much focus these days, at the moment, while we are doing this inquiry, on admissions and the impact that has on standards. Each of you has spoken about how you have dragged your schools up from low points to the position where they are achieving much better results. How has the climate change? Has it all changed or has it just been down to you? Has there been a pressure applied - social policy, government policy, by parents - do you feel?

Mr Jones: I think the determination came from within me to change the whole culture of the school, from one of colleagues having low expectations to one of them having high expectations, and all that came from that. I am a great believer in motivating the youngsters, and nothing motivates children more than praise. It is a very powerful motivator - we know that from our own experiences. It is also the way that colleagues respond with colleagues, children react with other children, and how staff and children interact; there is a whole package there that I think is very important indeed for the success and to raise the achievement. There is no one ingredient. I would suggest there are no magic wands to bring this about overnight: it is just sheer dogged hard work, day in and day out, month after month, and year after year, and if you carry your staff and your parents with you and the children are responding then I think you have the right ingredients, if you like, for a good school.

Mr Wood: I think I would talk more generally about the climate that has changed in the thirty-plus years that I have been in teaching. There was very little press coverage of education 30 years ago; now, it is never out of the newspapers, be they local or national, although some of it is very distorted. I think that it is a very good thing that we have put education at the centre of our national life. Looking at that from the parental point of view, I used to despair of the parents who would come to look round my school on open day and ask, "Does the bus stop nearby?" Now, you will get parents who actually ask you about the literacy strategy and so on. That is wonderful, that they are taking a keen interest in their children's education rather than the mere logistics of getting them to the school or what they are going to have for lunch.

Mrs Laycock: I think leadership, head teacher leadership, is absolutely vital in taking the school, whatever that school is, further along. In my school I have 88 teaching staff but I have appointed 61 of them, and I had to move people out. People had to go, either willingly or otherwise. I think there are some other factors as well. In the last seven years, the Department, the DFES, is listening to schools more. There is much more a sense of partnership, of what works and what we are doing well together - I am involved in a number of gropus around the DFES and NCSL - and I think buying into a joined-up picture of where we are all going on behalf of all staff and students. The self belief issue. The ethos. You know, if you walk into my school, children will say, "Hello," "Good morning," "Can I help you?" shake hands, have eye contact. That is part of our behaviour policy. It is about all of us working hard together. It is dogged hard work. It is not about super heads who can come in for two years and do something and then disappear; it is about persistence, it is about consistency, it is about dotting all the i's and crossing the t's. It is also about the human face, I think, of the Government. Ours was the school Tony Blair and David Blunkett visited in February. Indeed, on a visit around the school over the hour and a half, Tony Blair played on the guitar with our band Jabberwocky and put David on the drums. That hit every national newspaper - and Private Eye! I am very proud of that. But that was fantastic for my school, my parents and my kids. This was unheard of, and it was the first time a prime minister had been to a Sheffield school since 1969. I do believe there is a better kind of partnership and big picture of what we are all trying to do together, not just within a school. I do not feel I am isolated in what I am doing.

 

Q508  Chairman: You used the word "leadership" rather than good management. Is there a difference between them?

Mrs Laycock: Yes, I think there is. Massive.

 

Q509  Chairman: What is the difference between a well-managed school and a well led school, then?

Mrs Laycock: I think leadership is absolutely vital. A leader, I believe, however that person displays it - and you may have picked up that I am a bit of an extrovert and I probably display it in a fairly loud and eccentric way, but leadership does not have to be like that - have to have a passion for what they are doing and have to inspire others to work with them in that team. Management is, I think, a level down, and that is far more to do with bureaucracy, administration and keeping things happening, but it is not inspirational.

Chairman: Thank you for that. You have been wonderful witnesses. You have given us a great deal of time and we have learned a lot. We are very impressed by the quality of the heads that obviously we have in this country. Thank you very much for coming to talk to us.

 

Memoranda submitted by Institute for Public Policy Research

and Campaign for Real Education

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: DR SHEILA LAWLOR, Director, Politeia, MR MARTIN JOHNSON, Research Fellow in Education, Institute for Public Policy Research, and MR NICK SEATON, Chairman, Campaign for Real Education, examined.

 

Q510  Chairman: Could I welcome our witnesses to this session. It is very good of you to give of your valuable time. I am sorry we have overrun the first session a little, but it was excellent value and so we had to keep a few more questions flowing. I think you will know - I know Martin Johnson was in at the last session listening - that we have had a whole year for our main inquiry, apart from all the other things the Committee does, and that has been looking at secondary education. This is the last phase in that. We are looking at school admissions policies. It is the hottest issue, the most difficult issue probably, of the five topics we have looked at. We are very grateful that you are with us today and we would very much like to hear from you. We have an admissions policy in this country. We have particular problems in some areas of the country, particularly London, and there has been a lot of evidence about the special conditions in London. Could I invite you, first, to say a couple of words to introduce yourselves and then to say what you think of the current state of the admissions policy that we have. Is it perfect? If it is wonderful and it is not broken, should we not leave it alone? Or does it need a radical overhaul? If you can do all that in two or three minutes, I would be very grateful.

Dr Lawlor: My name is Sheila Lawlor and I am director of a think tank called Politeia. Thank you very much for inviting me. I will try to summarise my thoughts in about two minutes, if I may. I think the schools admissions policy we are operating now and the one which is planned under the new Code of Practice is essentially a very dishonest system. I think it is dishonest because it is designed to give the impression of choice but that choice is a chimera. The system where you had central or local government allocation of places, on the whole remains, except for those schools which are their own admissions authorities. We have a familiar model of central planning. We have seen it in other countries in economic terms, the Soviet Union or China, Five-Year Plans, Great Leap Forwards, but in this country we are not willing to say it is essentially a centrally planned model with no real choice. Because the two main parties - and I am talking about for schools which are not their own admissions authority - are excluded from this very important decision: the schools themselves and the parents, in practice. This has disadvantages, I think, for the schools' professionalism. We are trying to encourage schools to take great responsibilities for teaching young people, and in any teaching institution - and I speak as somebody who has been in a teaching institution - one of the central marks of its professionalism is responsibility for admissions; sensible responsibility delegated. We are also undermining parental responsibility because this is a vital area where parents are responsible for their children. The aims of the system are many, but it is very unclear what is the precise aim. If it is simply to make sure that no child does better than another, it might be better to close down all schools so they were all equally bad. However, if it is to ensure - and it is an aim I share - that all children, particularly those who are disadvantaged in one way or another, have as good a chance of a good education as every other child, I would say there are better ways to do it, Chairman. This, at heart, is a problem really of ideology. There are two ways of running a school system. There is the centrally planned model, with admissions authorities, admissions forum, criteria, an adjudicator, an appeals panel and the secretary of state and the LEAs, or there is a free system of choice, where parents would apply directly to a school and the schools would admit or not the pupil. In my view, the best way to help disadvantaged children, in fact all children, is to have a choice model, so that, where good, schools will get better, and poor schools will too get better. Because, in the end, I think we have played around with a system which in one way or another has been collectively planned and run, with many laws, constant change, fresh admissions criteria, fresh bodies to supervise the appeal, a system which lacks transparency, clarity and accountability. In the end I would go along with John Maynard Keynes and say that it is better to have a free system really because it is better to get things "roughly right than precisely wrong".

 

Q511  Chairman: I take it that you are not content with the present system!

Dr Lawlor: No, not at all.

Mr Pollard: Very perceptive of you, Chairman.

 

Q512  Chairman: Martin Johnson?

Mr Johnson: Than you, Chairman. Good morning. As you will have seen, I come from quite a long teaching background and a trade union background, but I have been a researcher with the IPPR for nearly three years and rely very much on evidence as a basis for policy making. I think the weakness of the present system is that it veers too much towards the concept of education almost as a consumer good, in that it appears that the only parties with an interest in school admissions are schools and parents. Education is not a consumption good; it is a service, offered by the state for all kinds of economic and social reasons. Therefore, there are a large number of stakeholders in the education service: the state, as I have said; the community, because schools perform community duties; as well as the parents, the schools and the pupils themselves. We at the IPPR do not think that the present system represents that range of interests as well as it should.

 

Q513  Chairman: Thank you. Nick Seaton.

Mr Seaton: Thank you, Chairman. I am Chairman for the Campaign for Real Education, which is a pressure group mainly consisting of parents but we have about one-third of our supporters are teachers. We press for basically higher standards and more parental choice. I think most people accept that there are not any perfect solutions about admissions. It is a difficult area. But also people get very concerned by moves to undermine parental choice in favour of compulsory social and academic mixing. Encouraging youngsters from less privileged homes is a noble ideal to be applauded, but it should not be done by discriminating against others. Nor, I think, should the Government restrict the freedom of law-abiding citizens. Almost all the problems with admissions occur simply because there are too few good state schools. That is the great problem, I think. I think the Government and ministers need to decide: Is the aim equality of opportunity or equality of results? If it is equality of opportunity, why undermine the best schools? - as in Gloucester, the grammar schools - and I have a particular interest in the grammar schools. Is it compulsory social mixing? Is that more important than parental choice? If so what rights have politicians, whether local or national, to deny parental preferences? There is a huge debate about what exactly is social inclusion. By all means, encourage, as I said earlier, youngsters from less privileged homes to move up in the world and get a good education - that is fine - but why should schools have to accept someone who disrupts everyone else? Why do they have a right to be included? Why is there no great fuss in other countries about selection? I think it is basically because they have good technical schools and so on which are popular with parents, so, if youngsters do not get into the most academic schools, they still get a good education, leading to good jobs. How can church schools and faith schools accept all-comers, as the Government is suggesting? Surely that destroys the school's whole purpose. Or is it just the intention to use the title for political purposes? - to give, as Sheila said, the impression of parental choice, whereas in the end all schools will be the same. I think the system at the moment is not working well. The emphasis is going too much toward State-control at both national and local levels and basically cutting out parents. We get quite a few complaints from parents. They are very sad cases, where youngsters are being forced into schools that their parents do not want them to go to simply because the LEA has an awkward catchment area or it wants to boost the performance of a poor school or something like that. It seems to me that the key point is, as any good manager would say, "If you want to boost the performance of a whole system or a business you leave the ones that are doing well to get on with it and put all your efforts into improving the less good." You do not start to tinker with the ones at the top and undermine the ones who are doing well in order to supposedly help the ones at the bottom. It just will not work. Apart from that, there are not the resources or the people to do it.

 

Q514  Chairman: We have had evidence given to this Committee - to take the London example, following the Greenwich decision on which schools will take which pupils from outside their area - that you no longer have the notion of community schools, certainly in London and possibly in other areas like Bristol and Leeds and so on, the big cities. Has it not been the case, though, that it is almost impossible to have a good social mix because schools no longer can serve their communities? The community does not go to the school that is nearest to them. Indeed, in London people travel vast distances in order to go to school. How has that Greenwich decision, in your view, affected the nature and quality of our schools?

Mr Seaton: Basically, I think most parents will go to their local school if the local school is a decent school. That is really all they want. It is common sense that the less distance the children have to travel, the better. But if the local school is a bad school, then they will travel. They do need choice, and if you deny that choice you are just making an excuse for the poor performers and weakening the high performers.

 

Q515  Chairman: Sheila Lawlor, what is your view, post-Greenwich.

Dr Lawlor: If parents are to have any opportunity to find a good education for their children without having to pay through the nose - and I think the figures in London are nine to 10 per cent of parents are now educating their children independently, which is ahead of the national average - I think it is important that you can have the cross-border traffic. We are publishing something by an author who is the assistant director of education at Wandsworth, and in his borough they have 6,000 pupils into Wandsworth from surrounding boroughs. It does not offer them particularly more problem or less problem, but it is important that we do preserve the role of the parent, so I would welcome anything which encourages such choice rather than restricts it.

 

Q516  Chairman: You celebrate the freedom that the Greenwich decision gave parents.

Dr Lawlor: I am not really a celebrator of anything about the system, Mr Chairman. I am sorry.

 

Q517  Chairman: Interestingly enough, when you said there is this deep unhappiness, other evidence the Committee has had already suggests that if you are an articulate, middle-class professional living in London and you can play the system, it works very well for you and you can get four or five choices of school. If you are less articulate and less knowledgeable, you will end up with one or sometimes no offers of a school.

Dr Lawlor: I think this is a problem with how the system is. If one were to move to a choice-based system right through - so that, at the end of primary school, the heads of the primary schools worked with the parents to help advise on a good choice of school where they really did have a chance, where they had connections, and where they could advise the parents and the family and where there was greater freedom - I think this would work. I have sat with heads in, say, Paris, and in Paris, in admitting pupils, where the pupils apply, there is an element of selection by the school, there is no doubt about it. But it is not a dirty word. It is a very open system, where the rules are always bent in order to encourage the children, partly those who live in the catchment and partly those who are able. It is a system, I think, which is working better because you have that element of choice and cross-border traffic.

Mr Johnson: Actually, I would not overemphasise the importance of the Greenwich judgment, in itself, as a single item. After all, it only affects people or largely affects people in areas where there are a number of small urban LEAs. If you look at London, which is, I have argued in my paper, unique in many ways, the Greenwich judgment came only shortly after the abolition of the ILEA, and of course there was cross-borough travel, a considerable amount, in the time of the ILEA. The Greenwich judgment, in London, really allowed the continuation of that traffic. Of course we do have, as I am sure you are aware, lots of examples where schools are located close to the borders of LEAs. Their natural catchment area, if I can put it that way - and that is not an unproblematic concept, as we have heard earlier this morning - is derived as much from a different LEA as from their own.

Chairman: We are into the subject now and Jonathan would like to ask a question.

 

Q518  Jonathan Shaw: Thank you. I would like to ask Sheila Lawlor, you have made your criticisms of the admissions system abundantly clear to the Committee and you have said a school should decide whether to admit or not the pupil.

Dr Lawlor: Yes.

 

Q519  Jonathan Shaw: Should there be any guidance from government/LEA at all, particularly for children in care?

Dr Lawlor: We have the law of the land which, as it stands, to my mind is too top heavy and too prescriptive right down to the bottom, but there must always be a legal framework to protect the interests of those who need to be educated. It is how we administer, how we define such a framework - where we can draw the lines and how we administer it.

 

Q520  Jonathan Shaw: Should children in care be admitted or not? Should there be a priority or not? Who decides, the school or the State, when 75 per cent of them leave schools without any qualifications at the moment?

Dr Lawlor: I think you have answered your own question, because the State has proved a pretty rotten carer for children in care, and perhaps we need to look beyond the State to find adequate means of representing children in care who are a very vulnerable group in society.

 

Q521  Jonathan Shaw: That is why, perhaps, the adjudicator has said - and a couple of weeks ago he sat where you are sitting and answered questions - that this should be a number one priority for schools which are oversubscribed in their admissions' criterion. Would you agree with him?

Dr Lawlor: I do not think the model which we are working at the moment - or which is not working very well at the moment - is the best model for a free society which gives opportunity to all. That is why I think an overhaul is needed. I would say that where you had a system of open and free choice, which encouraged greater responsibility by schools, and greater powers to go with what we expect of professional people and of those responsible for children, the parents or the people in loco parentis if they are in care, you would have better schools all round, at the top, the middle and the bottom, and we would not all be chasing a tiny number of good maintained schools, especially in the big metropolitan areas.

 

Q522  Jonathan Shaw: Mr Seaton, what is your view? Should schools be directed to take children in care as priority number one if they are oversubscribed?

Mr Seaton: I am inclined to think not. It is a difficult decision, I accept. I do accept those sort of children need special care, but I think a lot will depend on the local circumstances and the circumstances of the school: Is it suitable for that child? and so on. I do not think we ought to concentrate our efforts on any sort of minority of children. I think we have to think of the main body first. I am not saying minorities of any sort do not matter, at all, but all I am saying is that we should not set the system or gear the system just to cater for the minorities and forget about the majority, basically. But I take your point.

 

Q523  Jonathan Shaw: So, generally speaking, both you and Sheila Lawlor are agreed: Not really. You say it is up to the school. It is entirely up to the school whether they take a child who is in care - and we know the consequent success of children in care - or quite an able child. That is up to the school, basically.

Mr Seaton: I do not accept that head teachers and school governors generally are uncaring people. I am sure, given the circumstances, and if they think they can do the best for that child, most people would help out if they can.

 

Q524  Jonathan Shaw: We heard from a head teacher, Mr Wood, earlier on - who, I am sure you will agree, is a caring man. He said very openly and candidly that children in care were never on the list: It really was not on the radar. If we do not put them on the radar, no one is ever going to consider them, are they? We are just not going to make any advancement for the most disadvantaged kids in our society.

Mr Seaton: It is whose fault that they are not on the radar?

 

Q525  Jonathan Shaw: We are now putting them on the radar. You are saying that they should not be.

Mr Seaton: No, locally, I mean.

 

Q526  Jonathan Shaw: Well, locally, nationally, whatever. We have heard from a head teacher, a very experienced able head teacher, who said they were not even on the radar. We know the background of the success of the kids in care. Now the adjudicator is saying: Number one priority for oversubscribed. But the two of you do not agree with that. You think it is the head teacher's decision. But we have already heard that it is not on the radar.

Dr Lawlor: I disagree because I am saying that I do not think a system which is centrally run and planned is working. I do not think it has served such children. I do not think by constant fine-tuning of the system or putting one case this year and another next ... Because I do not think, in the end, you can run a system around one group: a clever group, a hard-pressed group, a socially excluded group. There are many different gropus in society, and either you see a society built up of minorities and run by officials, that is what it amounts to, or you put your trust in teachers. Last week, I was discussing with somebody who provides care for the mentally handicapped, a private provider. He does a great deal of work for the National Health Service and he brings in directly and looks after disturbed children and young people. He is filling a gap which the State simply cannot fill. We are funding such children but they are getting a raw deal, so why not try to move beyond this vision of a run-system, planned and provided, where you decide the targets, and put your trust in professionals and let the funding follow them accordingly? That would be my model.

 

Q527  Jonathan Shaw: Mr Johnson, do you agree as well?

Mr Johnson: I think the example you have chosen is an extremely good one of a situation in which there are interests above those of individual schools. Here is a social issue which has not been addressed. Parliament has decided that it should be addressed by placing its priority in the admissions code. My only comment on that is that, in my view, the new code is going to be a little bit slow in ensuring that that particular criterion does in fact take effect in all the schools, particularly those which would be loathe to do so.

 

Q528  Jonathan Shaw: Do you think some schools would be loathe to do so?

Mr Johnson: Don't you?

 

Q529  Jonathan Shaw: No, I am asking the questions. I have been a witness for things, but I am trying to find out.

Mr Johnson: I think there would be some.

Jonathan Shaw: Thank you, Chairman.

Chairman: Andrew, I would like you to pick up the cudgels on Schools Admissions Policies, Competition and Performance.

 

Q530  Mr Turner: We are reviewing admissions policies. Could I ask what you think the outcomes are of the present system that are unsatisfactory. The earlier witnesses provided some processes. Could you describe some of the outcomes of the present system that you think are unsatisfactory or damaging or whatever.

Mr Johnson: The first thing is that it is important to remember that in a lot of places the present system works not too badly in practice. I think it is very important to have regard to the particular geographical and social characteristics of an area, which is why I think a local education authority has an important role to play in the system, because they are aware of their own local circumstances. As I think the Committee has heard frequently, the problem lies particularly in the larger cities. I think there the outcomes which are unsatisfactory are, broadly, that there is insufficient balance of intakes between the schools. I think one important reason why that is a problem is that it does tend to lead to a number of schools in which it is extremely difficult, difficult almost to the point, if not to the point, of impossibility, for the pupils in those schools to achieve at the levels that they may have the potential to do so because of the accumulation of problems and difficulties in that school. I think Mo Laycock earlier referred to a critical mass of pupils being necessary. There are too many schools in our cities which lack that critical mass under the present arrangements. It is a question of overall educational attainment.

 

Q531  Mr Turner: May I come back to that after I have heard the other two answers. What are the unsatisfactory outcomes?

Dr Lawlor: I think it is a system where you have encouragement for parents to appeal and you have some authorities where there are very high proportions of appeals. You have heard in this Committee from people who run this system and who have different perspectives as to whether it is too tight or not free enough, but I think those who are running and operating the system, and also those parents who are using it, may be dissatisfied. That in itself - a feeling that, though we live in a democratic country, you do not really in the end get to the bottom of who takes the decision, and whether you have had a fair hearing - is bad for a system.

Mr Seaton: Basically, I think nationally the figures do not look too bad for the outcomes, but, when you look at particular areas and that sort of thing, there are some which are very, very bad. Another thing I think we ought to consider, which for ideological reasons is not often considered, is that all the evidence, the raw evidence, which has not been adjusted for valued-added or estimated free school meals, shows that selective systems in Northern Ireland and in this country, selective areas or selective LEAs, produce results that are about 10 per cent absolutely better than totally comprehensive systems and about 25 per cent relatively better. If we are aiming for higher standards throughout the system, I would suggest that there ought to be more selective schools not less. And the secondary modern schools, since 1967, have improved. People always decry them, but they have improved at six times the rate of comprehensive schools in five or more GCSEs, so secondary modern schools, although people get snooty about them, do and can produce extremely good results. I think people know the rough intake of a school, whether it is a selective school or it is taking youngsters from a not-very-prosperous area and so on. Most parents, if they look at the tables and the results in the league tables, will take that into account. Nobody expects their schools to do miracles, but, for all that, I think we have to build on what is good rather than undermine what is good for the sake of what is bad and spoil the whole ship.

 

Q532  Mr Turner: Could I come back to Mr Johnson. You said that not having a balanced intake leads to an almost impossible task for schools. Are you saying it leads to lower standards overall, that most schools do not have a balanced intake?

Mr Johnson: I would not want to say that any school that did not have the normal distribution nationally or for its LEA was unbalanced and therefore could not be a successful school. I am talking about schools at the end of the distribution, if you like. I do think the fact that they find it very difficult to get their children to achieve at levels which they may be capable of in aggregate has depressed the overall attainment.

 

Q533  Jeff Ennis: We have already heard evidence that the top 200 state schools in this country have an average of three per cent children on free school meals. The average across all state schools is 17 per cent free school meals. What does that tell us about the current admissions system in this country?

Mr Seaton: I am not saying that free school meals is something that should be ruled out as a judgment or of use in making a value judgment altogether. I think it can give some indication of where a school is underperforming or overperforming. But free schools, we have to remember, are only estimates of the number of parents who are calculated to be eligible for free school meals; they are not a basic factual piece of evidence. Certainly, if the top-performing schools only have four per cent, we would expect those schools to do well. They are doing well. But, as I have said, I think the key point is to concentrate on the ones which are doing less well and leave the good ones to get on with what they are doing. Equalling out, to me, equality of results, is a very, very dangerous thing.

 

Q534  Jeff Ennis: In the top schools, you are suggesting, you would have a limit or a cap on the number of children who are on free school meals to, say, three per cent/four per cent. Is that what you are telling us?

Mr Seaton: No. I am saying I do not honestly think it matters all that much.

Dr Lawlor: Your question is that some schools have three per cent on school meals and do better but there are schools where ----

 

Q535  Jeff Ennis: If some schools have three per cent, that means other schools have 50-odd per cent.

Dr Lawlor: I think that the premise of the question is a bit simplistic.

 

Q536  Jeff Ennis: You are here to answer the question, not to say whether it is simplistic or not.

Dr Lawlor: Thanks. Could I just give you an example, because this is why I think there is a problem with the way the question is put. I heard yesterday of a borough where in some schools 30 per cent of the intake were on free school meals and those were top performing schools in the borough - outperforming even schools where your three per cent may have been - but there were other schools where there were 30 per cent and they were not doing well. This quite experienced director of education explained that, in his view - and the school meals test is a test for disadvantage, there is no doubt about it - it is a matter of how good the school is at teaching the children which matters and how the funding system works. He linked it to funding, which is not for your Committee today, but I would say that, if you can get schools with one-third intake on free school meals which are top performing schools, it is very heartening, and we should try to look at those models for success.

 

Q537  Chairman: That seems very similar to what the Prime Minister says.

Dr Lawlor: You have a very great leader.

Chairman: The Prime Minister does make the case consistently that we should compare like with like. When he gets concerned, as I understand it, and when this Committee gets concerned, is when schools, which on paper look as if they have the same sort of intake, are performing very differently. But I think that is a different issue. Jeff, have you finished?

 

Q538  Jeff Ennis: I just wonder what Mr Johnson thought.

Mr Johnson: Not surprisingly, I would draw the opposite conclusion to that reached by Sheila. I think it is another piece of evidence that pupil performance, and therefore school performance, is very, very largely due to factors outside the school, and particularly the social backgrounds of pupils. About 80 per cent of the variation of school performance is due to factors outside the school, which, if I may just continue, is one reason why excessive parental interest in which particular school their children should attend is rather misplaced.

 

Q539  Jeff Ennis: Jonathan has already mentioned about the situation with children in care. Is the new admissions system fair to children with special educational needs?

Mr Seaton: Basically, again, this is a root problem of the whole state system, in that honest psychologists and so on say there are about five per cent of children with genuine special needs of various different types and difficulty and so on, but we accept in the state system that around 20 per cent of children have special needs. In some schools it is 50 per cent. That figure is largely because a lot of these special needs, a lot of the experts would say, are actually created by poor teaching of reading. It is not that actually the child is mentally deficient or has a problem with anything, it is just that they have not been taught well in the early stages of the primary education. I think, again, the Government should be looking to reduce ... I know we have the National Literacy Strategy, but, again, it has not worked as well as it might and we should be looking to reduce those special needs to about five per cent. But, by all means, the children who have special needs need special treatment, and the money should be there for it.

Mr Johnson: Under the new Code, SEN has not been given any particular place, unlike the needs of children in care. I think there is a good argument for saying that it could have been. The problem is, of course, that the introduction of too many factors into the oversubscription criteria then gives the problem of ordering those, and it does make the admissions system potentially much more complicated. But I do think, if Parliament did not take the view that it should make a decision in that direction, that it should be open to individual local authorities to take that view given the circumstances of their own area. Of course, then it would not be effective unless and until the local authority became the admissions authority for all the schools within its area. Constantly on my mind during this session is that wonderful phrase you had from Dr Hunter, "a drift to the posh," I think, which is a pressure on schools at the moment. In so far as that does exist, that is a pressure not to take pupils with special educational needs very often.

Dr Lawlor: With special educational needs, there are different sorts of needs. Some are clearly educational needs: children who have missed out on a primary education which equips them for secondary education. There is a problem very often with young male children in primary school - we see this in the Anglo Saxon world - where at a certain stage they become less academically oriented and it is very hard to get them through the primary stage ready for secondary. There are all kinds of special educational needs, but there are also social needs, and I think we need to be clear of what they are. I do not think there is any blanket answer: different children will need different support. I know some heads who are very keen to have children with a special educational needs statement because they get a great deal more money - and they are quite open and honest about it. I think the system, so far as we have it, seems to work quite well because it represents a great deal of extra funding to a head who will be quite happy to have special educational needs children when they are there. But I would like, from the point of view of the child, to break down that need into what is really needed and try to tackle it as early as possible.

 

Q540  Jeff Ennis: On the London paper that the IPPR presented - so this question is addressed to Martin - they are advocating the return of the middle schools to resolve the problem: schools should admit pupils from 13 to 14. Speaking as an ex-middle school teacher, the reason why the middle schools disappeared was because of SATs, level 2. Are you advocating that we do away with SATs at level 2 and just have level 3?

Mr Johnson: We did not say that!

 

Q541  Jeff Ennis: Do you think there might be a return back to middle schools?

Mr Johnson: In practice, I think a lot depends on population changes. If we have areas of London where the school population is rising and school building needs to take place, then there might be a case for rethinking. I know it goes against the grain, because I know the few LEAs which still retain the schooling are under some pressure; Devon is getting rid of the middle schools in Exeter at the moment, for example. But I myself have been a proponent of middle schools because I feel that the ones I have seen are pretty successful.

Chairman: I want to move to the second on banding. David wants to ask a question on that area.

 

Q542  Mr Chaytor: Thanks, Chairman. Mr Seaton, in your submission to the Committee you described banding as "totalitarian socialism," a miniature step towards the "Marxian ideal" and you go on to rail against political correctness and talk about a "mish-mash of Third-Way fudge". Some people might think you have a political agenda!

Mr Seaton: Yes, Chairman.

 

Q543  Chairman: You have every right to have a political agenda at this Committee.

Mr Seaton: I based that on A Dictionary of Marxist Thought edited by Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V G Kiernan and Ralph Miliband - who I guess is the father of our current schools minister.

 

Q544  Chairman: He is the father, and he taught me at the London School of Economics.

Mr Seaton: Right. Anyway, it says that the main components of Marxist educational theory are: "Free public education, compulsory and uniform for all children, assuring the abolition of cultural or knowledge monopolies and of privileged forms of schooling .... Later, other objectives were made explicit, such as the necessity to weaken the role of the family" - which is what Sheila was talking about earlier, taking away the responsibility from parents and giving it to the State. It also says, "The community is assigned a new and vast role in the educational process" and there is to be "a switch from competitiveness to cooperation ..." This seems to me to almost mirror many of the educational policies that are going on at the moment. When we talk about banding, if you are going to put a mix of academic ability, social class, religious affiliation and so on into a school, what are you aiming for? Is it equality of results? Is it so that all the schools are all the same and all the youngsters come out exactly the same?

 

Q545  Mr Chaytor: So the head of the Church of England boys' school from whom we heard earlier, who operates the banding system, is a Marxist.

Mr Seaton: No, I am not saying that at all. Do you mean banding within the school? I am talking about banding in admissions. Are we on two different things here? Maybe I did not make that clear.

 

Q546  Mr Chaytor: We are talking about banding as a criterion for admitting pupils to the school.

Mr Seaton: Yes, okay.

 

Q547  Mr Chaytor: It is what happens in the Church of England school. Is this totalitarian?

Mr Seaton: It seems to me to be a dangerous path. It is leading not to equality of opportunity (giving all youngsters the best possible opportunity to do well whatever their background or race or culture or anything else); it is using the system to produce equality of results.

 

Q548  Chairman: If I may intervene, the head who actually expressed these views and had this school was one who was most favourable towards selective education, and the reason he had introduced it was that he was in a school in very challenging circumstances and he wanted to raise the ability range that were coming into the school - so 40 per cent were above average ability, 40 per cent were average and 20 per cent below. A very selective principle, which, in one sense, Mr Seaton, you would have agreed with.

Mr Seaton: No, because you are not measuring it really. Are you measuring it on any objective criteria? Do the youngsters do a test for social class?

Chairman: No.

 

Q549  Jonathan Shaw: On ability.

Mr Seaton: Academic ability, fine. But if they are a Muslim and the school has too many Muslims, do they get refused a place or what? It seems to me a dangerous concept.

 

Q550  Mr Chaytor: Mr Seaton, the way banding has always operated in the former Inner London Authorities, and still in some Inner London Authorities and in other parts of the country, is entirely on academic ability or alleged academic ability. What is your objection to having a balanced distribution of ability within a given school?

Mr Seaton: I think most teachers, if they are honest, and most of the research, suggests that youngsters learn better with other youngsters of similar ability.

 

Q551  Mr Chaytor: Which research?

Mr Seaton: Well, Dr John Marks. He did a campaign for us actually, for the Campaign for Real Education, a good few years ago which was well documented. I can produce that for you.

 

Q552  Mr Chaytor: I am looking at your pamphlets here. Of the last ten pamphlets, your name appears as the author of three of them, Fred Naylor as the author of four, and someone called David Marsland as the author of another three. It is not exactly a broad spread authorship, is it?

Mr Seaton: No. It is just that we have been so busy over recent years with lots of other things. We are a voluntary organisation, not publicly funded or highly staffed or anything, and we have tended to take what has come rather than actually go out and commission work.

 

Q553  Mr Chaytor: You started in 1987 with 14 members. How many members do you have now?

Mr Seaton: We do not have members, we have supporters, but round about 3,000. I mean, it goes up and down all the time. As people's children go through school, they drop out and so on.

 

Q554  Mr Chaytor: Could I ask Dr Lawlor about the issue of banding. What is your objection to banding?

Dr Lawlor: I did not say I had an objection or I did not. What I have an objection to is an admissions authority determining for a school the banding. The Code of Practice as it is coming out - the most recent, with the section on banding which I had a look at - is quite prescriptive. If a school chooses to exercise banding, and many schools do, their heads and teachers and governing bodies decide: "This is the best way. We want a comprehensive intake. We can cope with setting or streaming children for lessons in individual subjects according to ability, top 25 per cent, bottom 25 per cent, middle range, 50 per cent," if you like. They know their applicants, they know how they can organise it and they feel that is how they will get the best out of the children and the teachers. That in itself would be a school decision. We have a grey area with the Codes of Practice as you are suggesting, because the grey area suggests that for schools who are proposing a banding procedure there are quite prescriptive guidelines. I think you really do need in any system to be clear. Is banding something which is a preference by an admissions authority? Is banding something which schools will be encouraged to follow? Or is banding something, if they do choose to have a banding admissions policy, where they must follow the guidelines? I just think you have to get it clear. I myself would rather leave it to the school because I think the school is best placed to say how best to teach the children in its educational and pastoral care.

 

Q555  Mr Chaytor: Your preference is that all schools ought to be their own admission authorities.

Dr Lawlor: I would prefer. I did speak to a head about this yesterday. He was his own admissions authority. It was not a school I know - I will say where it was, but I do not know whether it should be repeated. It was in Enfield. He said he thought that most schools could run their own admissions policy pretty sensibly and would resolve, in the interests of the children and the teaching staff, how to do it. He thought 80 per cent of schools could cope with that, and maybe 20 per cent was the figure ... And I have heard that figure mentioned by many heads from different areas, and not people by any means who would think very carefully about the kind of system they operate; they simply think of the problems they have to deal with. It would make life easier, more sensible, give them a direct relationship with the parents - because they have found that if they can explain to a parent why your child will not suit our school but another school and so on, parents are more willing to take things from heads and teachers whom they see as professionals, rather than an anonymous appeals procedure. I would urge the Committee to consider whether all schools could be their own admissions authority. Then it would be for the law of the land to decide what framework they would operate under, but the schools could be their own admissions authority. It would help to restore the responsibility which I think schools would welcome and I think it would give a direct face to a system which parents feel very often lost in.

 

Q556  Mr Chaytor: You want to see a fully fledged market in secondary education.

Dr Lawlor: The word "market" nowadays is often seen, I am afraid, as a dirty word. I would say free system. I think there is a lot in Britain and in the history of this country ... Even in countries where you have had a much more centrally controlled system, such as in Germany or in France (for the Länder in Germany, or in France, as we all know about what every French child has to do at certain times) nonetheless, though you have in theory quite a planned system, in practice there is a great deal more freedom for parents and, indeed, for schools. Twenty-five per cent of French children are educated in non-state schools but founded principally by public money. In Germany, for instance, in the nursery sector a Land may not set up a Land nursery school unless there is no independent or voluntary school there, and the funding must follow. So every country has found ways of decentralising what in practice is a centralised system, and they find it works.

 

Q557  Mr Chaytor: How do you reconcile on the one hand your concern with maximising parental choice and on the other hand with giving power to individual schools as their own admissions authority? Within the market model, exactly who are the buyers and who are the sellers? Who are the producers and who are the consumers?

Dr Lawlor: It is a very fair question. I would answer that we have two systems and neither will be perfect. Some people will feel it is a fairer system to take out the parents and the school from the equation and try to run the system as a system for everybody. Others will say, as I would say, that it is better to have a free system with direct accountability and responsibility between the professional party involved, the teachers in the school, and the parents. Yes, there will be some differences, but I would ask: Would there be more differences and more problems and more unhappy people and fewer bad schools in such a system than at present? I think that unless Parliament in the end can put its hand on its heart and say, "Another system will work better in the interests of everybody, including disadvantaged children," it is worth considering, because we have not tried it and it is worth trying. Other countries have tried it and it works.

 

Q558  Mr Chaytor: How can it be a free system if parents are actually denied their right of choice by the decision of an individual school?

Dr Lawlor: Parents are now denied their right of choice.

 

Q559  Mr Chaytor: Surely, but you are arguing for greater choice. The proposal you are putting forward would actually reduce choice.

Dr Lawlor: I am saying that the system we have essentially now is dishonest. This whole idea of preference which the code of admissions really does go into quite a lot, and all the many, many papers on the idea that "parental preference must be met unless ..." and then there are certain criteria, this, I understand from local authorities and head teachers, is taken very often as meaning that parents have choice. They do not have choice. I think the people in this country must be treated as grown up people - schools as well. I might apply to a school, I might be turned down - as I have been, indeed. This can happen. All right. You can live with the choices you make yourself and fail. What we have now is a system where people are expressing preferences, not making choices, and there is nobody to whom they can really bring their case, make it and either be accepted or rejected. I am not sure that the system as we have under the Code of Practice as now intended will make for greater choice. It will not make for greater choice than a free system.

 

Q560  Mr Chaytor: Is not the logic of your argument the abolition of ability and aptitude as admissions criteria?

Dr Lawlor: It would be for the school admissions bodies, the governing body and the head teacher. That, again, I think is a problem with your code of admissions. The deliberate express exclusion of the head from any decision seems to me an attack on the professionalism of the head. No, it would be for the school and the head to decide. I know many schools which went grant maintained after 1988, and they took a deliberate decision, but even after the five years allowed within the law to change character they would not. Their mission was to educate all children. I am sorry to disagree and go on: there is a case for every sort of school, but I think it is who takes the decision as to what sort of school it should be.

Q561  Mr Chaytor: Would you accept that the more schools which take a decision to admit on grounds of ability or aptitude, the greater the denial of choice to more parents?

Dr Lawlor: I think if we let the system, the heads and governing bodies decide, you would find that the system would even out, probably more in line with what parents wanted than what we have now. We do not know because this country, uniquely, has not done it.

 

Q562  Jonathan Shaw: You are saying that it is the teachers and the governors who should make the decisions. We hear from teachers, from governors, and they are, not always but generally, saying, "We want the LEA to be the admissions authority." Schools have choices at the moment - to become foundation, voluntary aided, community schools - and most schools choose to be community schools.

Dr Lawlor: Yes.

 

Q563  Jonathan Shaw: So there is that choice. What are you so worried about?

Dr Lawlor: I was asked about admissions policies and whether there should be choice. Your question is why am I worried that schools do not have the choice of admissions policy. You have brought up the point that schools do not want that choice. If I ----

 

Q564  Jonathan Shaw: No, they have made that choice and their choice is the LEA.

Dr Lawlor: If they make that choice and want to delegate ... Let me give you a counter-example. After the 1988 Act, when financial delegation to schools - which has, I think, been proved by all sides to be a great success - was mooted, I remember many, many discussions with heads and governing bodies who did not want to have financial delegation. They did not want to be responsible. If we are seriously interested in the whole business of educating children, we need to delegate as much responsibility. If people do not want to take it on crucial areas about the character of their school, about the pastoral and educational support for their children, it may be that the teaching profession is not for them. We have found - and this was a hard lesson - that people who really are interested in teaching will take the vital decisions and go that extra mile, but if we do not encourage that sort of person -----

 

Q565  Jonathan Shaw: I am not sure that the admissions criteria is going to form an important part of teacher training. I think that parents would be more concerned about people training to be teachers in terms of their ability to teach maths, English and science et cetera. Your example of the devolution of funding, I accept. However, at the moment there are different systems operating. It is not something new for schools, as was the devolvement of funding, so it is not a good example. If a school wanted to make the choice to become a voluntary aided or foundation school or a community school, they could do. They have the freedom to do that at the moment.

Dr Lawlor: Yes.

 

Q566  Jonathan Shaw: You are saying that because they have not experienced it, it means that they do not understand the freedom that they are missing.

Dr Lawlor: No, no. I am sorry, voluntary aided schools are a particular model of school which comes from the 1944 Act. On the whole they tended to be those church schools which could find - and there was a big battle about it in the forties - enough money for capital progress and capital expenditure. That has subsequently been reduced, but essentially they are in an independent position: they had a different kind of governing body and they were subject not to the local education authority on many things. They have long been quite independent in many areas. The foundation schools are, as you know, the ex GM schools.

 

Q567  Jonathan Shaw: I do know all the different criteria.

Dr Lawlor: The question is: If you have had a school which has been run by a local authority, where the local authority is the admissions authority, and which has not delegated ... My point is that I think the system has got it wrong. I would start with the schools and have the local authorities not running the admissions but I would hand it to the schools. You have one view, and it is perfectly respectable, many people think it, but I have another.

 

Q568  Jonathan Shaw: The Committee are forming a view from the evidence that we receive. My final point is that a head teacher this morning, Mr Wood, went GM and now he is back in the LEA.

Dr Lawlor: He made the choice.

 

Q569  Jonathan Shaw: Right. So choices are available now.

Dr Lawlor: Choices to admit your pupils yourself are not available. The Code of Practice will not make it available. The care of the pupil, very often for six years, pastorally and educationally, is a very important responsibility. If you admit your pupils, you probably ... I will tell you what one head said: "I prefer and we all prefer as a school body to live with our own mistakes, not somebody else's." That is a very important thing to remember in a free society.

 

Q570  Mr Pollard: I wonder if I could ask Dr Lawlor a very simplistic question. I apologise - I did go to a grammar school but I am not as bright as the rest on the Committee. In St Alban's, my constituency, a very middle class constituency, one of the most middle class in the country, we have 1600 school places, 950 local places - so we import a lot of children. One school, STAGS, St Alban's Girls School, has 180 places and 350 preferences. How do we square that with parental choice?

Dr Lawlor: Life is not simple. One man to whom I spoke yesterday had 180 places and 2,000 applicants. Is it fairer that the school decides or that the local authority decides? It is simply a matter of which system you run. Yes, in the end, life brings its mixed blessings, and many times we are treated unfairly, but I am arguing for a system where, if there is a grievance, the grievance is not by virtue of somebody who is outside the relationship between the school and the family, who is simply doing this as an official running a system. You will have a greater advantage for the professionalism of the teachers and the school and for the parental responsibility if that relationship is direct. Yes, it is difficult, but there are not any easy choices. We have those problems now. I do not think if we move to a different sort of system you would have more of a problem. You would probably have fewer appeals and fewer of this very complicated arrangement which you have all heard about, because I have been reading all the papers and the evidence from the local authorities. I must say it is a tribute to your ... Do you know just how much, if you were a headmaster or a headmistress, you would have to read if you were coming here, just to know what the law is? That is the most recent. For those reasons, no system is going to be perfect. The question I would ask is this: Is the system you have going to be fairer to your school in St Alban's, and the parents and those responsible, and seen to be fairer - and, you know, it is a democratic society, seen to be fairer - than a more anonymous system where there is a third party doing these vital things for you?

 

Q571  Mr Pollard: In 1994 - just as a piece of evidence for you, perhaps - we had GM schools, faith schools and private sector schools. It was as free a system for choice as you can get and it was a mess. An absolute and total mess.

Dr Lawlor: In St Alban's are you talking about?

 

Q572  Mr Pollard: Yes, it was. It was a complete mess.

Dr Lawlor: In what respect?

 

Q573  Mr Pollard: Some kids got three offers, some got none, and it was a year and a half before the system was sorted out. Now we have gone back to a collegiate system of selection which everybody seems satisfied with. Nick Seaton mentioned earlier on that the system was "not too bad," where 96 per cent of pupils were getting their choice of school. Are you suggesting change to suit the four per cent who did not get their choice? where the tail would be wagging the dog - which is what you were advocating not to do. You say that minorities are ruling, it is not good. You are suggesting that because 96 per cent are okay generally, that the system should be changed to suit that four per cent.

Mr Seaton: No. To be honest, I would suggest that those people who are less than satisfied is probably a lot more than 96 per cent. But, for all that, whatever it is, the four per cent who are left, or more, are generally fairly tragic cases. The thing is, basically, that the system is moving. It is a slow process but it is moving away from parental responsibility and parental choice to the state, both locally and nationally, taking all the responsibility. That is my fear. If I could briefly go back to the point about schools being their own admission authorities, I do not think that is incompatible with parental choice. If the head and the governors set an ethos for the school - which may be a highly academic school, it may be a caring school which wants to help children with special needs or low achievers or it may be a faith school or anything - parents know what that school does, they know what sort of a school it is, and many will choose it. Many of the schools, given the choice, will go down these different directions, I am sure. I do not think the two things of having the school as an admissions authority and parental choice are incompatible at all. I mean, look at our Prime Minister sending his children to the London Oratory: he wanted the ethos of the school. To me, that is fine.

 

Q574  Jeff Ennis: On the idea of every school being its own admissions authority, the prime concern of a school and the governors of a school is to educate all the children within that school to the very best of their ability, I would suggest, no matter what the type of school is. Everybody would accept that as a given. Is there a responsibility within each admissions authority and the individual school to the wider community, to its neighbouring schools? Does it have to take into concern what their strategy is? Should we be looking at a federation of schools within an area to provide a good educational system for all schools, not just for the children within the individual school?

Mr Seaton: This idea of variety between different types of school, obviously it would work in urban areas, but in rural areas, where you probably have only one school within a 10-mile radius, this school has to cater for everyone. This idea of federations of schools, I think, again, it is producing another excuse for failure, in that, as far as I can see, there is talk of publishing the exam results for the federation rather than the individual school and things like that. It could hide failure. That is my worry, quite honestly. I am sorry, what was the key question again? I apologise.

 

Q575  Mr Pollard: That is the main point: Do they need to take regard of the wider community? And when I say the wider community I mean the other local schools that may be impacted upon by their selective policy, or whatever their admissions policy is.

Mr Seaton: Maybe it is idealism but I still think most teachers, most schools, most governors care about their local communities and want to serve their local communities.

 

Q576  Mr Pollard: But they do not have to take consideration of the other schools' admissions policies.

Mr Seaton: I think a bit of competition between schools is fair enough. Again, I think that would raise standards all round and improve parental satisfaction.

 

Q577  Mr Pollard: What do you think about that, Mr Johnson?

Mr Johnson: The one thing that struck me about the evidence given to you by the head teachers this morning was the assumptions of autonomy which they all carried with them. Even Mo Laycock, who seemed to want to be part of a community of Sheffield schools, spoke, as I interpreted it, as if it was up to her, effectively, and her governing body, of course, as to how they played it. Schools are part of a public service. They are funded by the taxpayer. Even, to a very great extent, voluntary aided schools are funded by the taxpayer, and so they must be accountable. That is a word we have not heard this morning, but I think it is a very important word. I do not see within the present system, on admissions or a range of other issues, the degree of accountability to the local community on the part of the individual schools that I would certainly wish. On admissions, if the LEA were the admissions authority for all the schools in its area, then the LEA is open to pressure from its citizens. Of course, there is ultimately the ballot box, but, more realistically and in between elections, if it was understood that councillors ultimately were responsible for the way the schools in their area admitted pupils, then their surgeries would be full of people knocking on their doors. There would be heat and it would be effective. That is democracy in action.

 

Q578  Chairman: You are trying to recreate communities where the heads who gave evidence this morning said they do not exist. Mr Wood said, "People now in London come from a very, very long way away. What is my community? Is it the community of church affiliation that comes from all over London? Is it the people who come from the next borough?" All of them said, in a sense - except for the head from Sheffield who has more of a community-based school - that a community is very difficult to identify for many schools these days.

Mr Johnson: I agree it is an issue. As you say, Chairman, it does depend on the geography very much. In London it is sometimes difficult - not always. You do find schools which are stuck in the middle of a very large estate - I am talking about within London - and you would say, "That school should serve that estate." It would not have a balanced intake. There are other circumstances in which that is not so likely. But the fact is that if for every school within a borough, within the London context, the borough were responsible for the admissions to that school, then the people of that borough could complain to that LEA and that council if things were not going well. At the moment, the adjudication system is difficult and long-winded and it is not direct.

 

Q579  Chairman: Martin, you call your ideas "Radical proposals on secondary admissions". How far would your new proposals address that problem better than what is proposed by the Government at the moment?

Mr Johnson: In what sense, Chairman?

 

Q580  Chairman: You are talking about your idea of collaboration between schools, and I think we have not really given you a chance to elaborate on that. That is why I am trying to bend over, to be fair to you, because you have had less of the questioning.

Mr Johnson: Thank you.

 

Q581  Chairman: You say you have a radical new proposal, based on a collegiate system and collaboration between the schools, and I do not think it has been articulated this morning just how that would work.

Mr Johnson: Our paper contains a number of proposals, some of which are complementary, some of which are alternatives, perhaps. If it were thought that the federation route were the appropriate one, I think it would have many advantages for London in particular. The advantages of a federation are many and not limited to admissions. A federation of schools could optimise the curriculum offer and care for every pupil within a selection of schools.

 

Q582  Chairman: We are familiar with the Tim Brighouse proposals. We went to Birmingham for a week and we know about this, but focus it on admissions. How would you help admissions?

Mr Johnson: If admissions were to a federation and not to an individual school - and I accept there are some difficulties in terms of parental acceptance of that idea but, nevertheless, I think the case could be argued and won ultimately - if pupils were admitted to a federation rather than the school, then that would site each pupil within a particular geographical area. I do take the view that the large majority of parents do not want their children to make excessively long journeys - and I know some do at the moment, but not that many. The vast majority of parents would opt for their local federation. Then the principle would be that, within that federation, the placement in the individual school would be decided on the basis of a balance of needs and volitions. The parental preference would be one factor, but so would be the pupil's preference and so would be - and this is another thing which is not recognised within the present admissions system - the educational needs of the pupil as defined, perhaps, by the primary school and any other relevant reports. It is a combination of those factors that would be used in deciding the most appropriate of the schools in the federation for any particular pupil, and at the same time there could be reference to the social good, the community good, of having more or less balanced intakes in all schools.

 

Q583  Chairman: You keep going back to this local and community link and you are very passionate about it. In your conclusions, I notice you say, "Then there remains a task for the Government supported by all parties involved in London schools. There is an ethical appeal to the upper strata of London society. The advantaged have a particular responsibility to be part of society and to help build it. In London, the advantaged have a duty to open their minds to the real quality of education, to realise that it is in their self-interest to use local provision, and in everyone's interest to play a part in continuing improvement of local provision." That is very passionate. But you have said you base your research on information and good examination of the evidence, so it is evidence-based. Have you evidence that that passionate appeal is what we need in the UK for admissions policies?

Mr Johnson: To be candid, I think the evidence is there and I do not think it is being publicised sufficiently.

 

Q584  Chairman: We have all sorts of parents making choices across London. They feel free. They can put their child on a quite safe form of transport, they can move across London. For people who are mobile, it is a wonderful set of choices, is it not? That is why I am surprised that Nick and Sheila seem to be discontent. It seems to me that they have got what they want.

Mr Johnson: The evidence I am talking about is the evidence about the quality of London's schools. I think the evidence is quite substantial that London schools are better than the national average in the context of their pupil intakes.

 

Q585  Chairman: So you would be disappointed if Parliamentary colleagues of ours had little faith in London's state provision.

Mr Johnson: I am extremely disappointed whenever ----

 

Q586  Chairman: I am talking cross-parties here.

Mr Johnson: As I have put in my report, I am disappointed whenever the most advantaged strata within London society are unaware of the quality of the schools around them. It is the case - there is evidence, there is statistical evidence - that for any given social background London schools do better.

 

Q587  Chairman: Is there any of this on which you would like to comment, Sheila Lawlor?

Dr Lawlor: I have not read your paper. I will read it and comment on it specifically, if I may.

 

Q588  Chairman: And send it to the Committee?

Dr Lawlor: I will, if I may. Just on the community thing: in the end, is it not a matter of how you define community? This is a serious problem, especially where families work quite a long way now from where they live. Children go to school in the most amazing directions. I get a train on Cambridge station every morning and I see little people coming up from London, Hertfordshire - the catchment is huge - and also coming down from King's Lynn in Norfolk. These are children making very long journeys on the train. Their parents have taken their decisions. It is not just ----

 

Q589  Jeff Ennis: Are these free school meals children that we are talking about here?

Dr Lawlor: Oh, my goodness, I don't ask them!

 

Q590  Jeff Ennis: You do not need to.

Dr Lawlor: As you know, you have the cross-border traffic - and for all kinds of reasons. It may be that parents are working out and so on. It is exactly the same with free school meals children. If you ask any of the directors of inner London, where do they get ... I referred to Wandsworth, where there are 7,000 children coming in from across the border; that is about one-quarter of the Wandsworth intake. So, yes, you do have cross-border traffic, but the question is: What is your community? It is a lovely idea, community, but is it your community at work, where your parents work? Where you live? Or where your children make friends and go to school? There are so many communities. It is a hard question, in practice.

 

Q591  Mr Turner: Mr Johnson, are you aware that the United Kingdom has schools which are less segregated than the average in the European Union in terms of parental occupation, family wealth, reading score or country of origin, and they are only more segregated than the average in terms of sex.

Mr Johnson: That is correct. That is Smith and Gorard - yes?

 

Q592  Mr Turner: Yes. What is this segregation that you are so worried about?

Mr Johnson: A lot of the debate about segregation I do not really understand. Firstly, it is an argument about whether it is increasing or decreasing; now it is an argument about whether there is more or less than other countries in Europe. I am interested in the amount there is. The segregation indices remain around the 30 to 35 per cent level. It is a political decision about whether that is acceptable or not.

 

Q593  Mr Turner: Right. Okay. Nick Seaton said that almost all the problems occur because there are too few good state schools. It is not the case that, however many or few admission authorities there are, and whatever the admissions criteria, unless more places in good state schools become available, the same number of pupils and their parents will continue to be disappointed?

Mr Johnson: On the one hand, I think it would be impossible ever to create a system in which all schools were seen in their communities as having equal status. That is not going to be possible. On the other hand, there is a lot of misapprehension, as I have already said, about the quality of schools. Because the measured outcomes of schools are so dependent on their pupil intakes, you cannot actually make judgments about the quality of schools in the way that is frequently done. People use the term "good school, bad school" quite erroneously. Many of the schools which have very poor, apparently, raw score outcomes - in which Nick is so interested - are very good schools according to a lot of criteria. I think the terms "good school", "bad school" are of negligible utility.

 

Q594  Mr Pollard: Too simplistic.

Mr Johnson: Well, schools do make a difference. That is not to deny that they do make a difference.

 

Q595  Mr Chaytor: Just pursuing that point, Chairman, could I ask each of our three witnesses if they think there would be a value - given that we have league tables and that league tables will continue in some form or other - in having an indicator of the school intake in the league table side-by-side with the school's raw score? That is to say, should there be the percentage of children on free school meals next to the percentage of children getting five A*-C at GCSE?

Dr Lawlor: I am sorry, but I do not believe in having league tables at all. I do not think they are a very helpful way of proceedings, so the more bits you add on to them I do not think is satisfactory. But if schools want to publish their intakes, and boast and use it as a way of attracting pupils, that would be fine, but I am not in favour of the league table culture.

Mr Johnson: I am glad to be able to agree with Sheila on something. I think there is a problem, in that value-added is a lot more difficult to measure in a way that is intelligible than a lot of people imagine. The other factor, actually, is that parents take less notice of league tables than a lot of people think. Surveys of the way parents behave in choosing a school for their children suggests that they do not look at the performance of schools very much: they look at perceived behaviour of the pupils. But I think there are all kinds of reasons why league tables are problematic. I personally do not think that tinkering with them in the way you have suggested would help.

 

Q596  Chairman: Nick, are you a league table man or not?

Mr Seaton: I am absolutely for league tables. I am not sure about Mr Chaytor's question. I am not really sure what the right answer is in that case, whether there should be a social factor or not. There is something, again, that sort of slightly rubs me up the wrong way. I think when you are talking about social factors all the time, as compared with academic results, you are making a basic assumption that, just because you come from a deprived background, you cannot do well. I would not accept that at all. To me, that is quite wrong. I am all in favour of raw results; I am extremely hostile to value added tables and so on because I think there is so much distortion going on with value added that it is like a four course race. The person who is winning on the second and third laps is not necessarily the person who is going to win the whole race but all that matters really is the person who wins the whole race; just as, with league tables and qualifications, all that matters is the certificate the youngster gets to put before an employer when he or she applies for a job. Again, I think if we are not careful we can get very muddled in statistics. I notice that Martin, in his paper, talks about "...discourse on good and bad schools is based on loose thinking and misleading data ..." There is an awful lot of misleading data around. I am all in favour of publishing the raw results, because I really do think that parents who are considering a school or who live in an area have a pretty good idea themselves, most of them.

 

Q597  Mr Chaytor: Are you against the principle of value-added? That is, are you opposed to schools publishing the extent to which they have developed each child's potential, or are you opposed to the particular methodologies that are being used?

Mr Seaton: If a school is taking a very good intake from a primary school, where they have done extremely well in the primary school and yet the GCSE results are awful, in that case, I think the value-added is showing you something which is quite important. You can say, "Well, that school is not adding the value for those youngsters that it should be."

 

Q598  Mr Chaytor: But without a value-added indicator, I would not know that.

Mr Seaton: No. I take your point. All I am saying is that value-added, if you are not careful, can get so confusing - and I am talking about some of the work of Professor David Jesson, for instance. It can reverse the true picture.

 

Q599  Mr Chaytor: Would you like a simpler model?

Mr Seaton: I would like to see raw results. I do not mind value-added, but I think the raw results should be there so that people can make their own judgment.

Chairman: I think we are going to draw a line there. It is coming up to 12.30. It has been a very illuminating session. Thank you very much for your attendance. It has been refreshing to hear such a diverse range of opinions. Thank you very much.