Oral evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 17 November 2003

Members present:

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

__________

Witnesses: MR DAVID BELL, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools in England (HMCI) and MS SHEILA BROWN, Her Majesty's Inspector, Head of LEA Division, Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) and MR NICK FLIGHT, Education Performance Specialist, Audit Commission, examined.

 

Q600  Chairman: May I welcome Ofsted in the shape of David Bell and Sheila Brown back to our deliberations? Kerry has already said that there is a feeling of déjà vu, but not for me as unfortunately I missed your last performance. I am sorry I was away. I heard there were rave reviews. I have known of Nick Flight for he has served in local education authorities very close to Huddersfield, my own constituency. Nick Flight, welcome; the LEA inspector in the Audit Commission. Sheila Brown is head of LEA Division of Ofsted and David Bell is the Chief Inspector of Schools. Everyone is aware that this is the final phase of our look at school admissions. I am going to ask you to say a few words in a minute to open up, but just to set the scene, we were a little puzzled at one stage at the beginning of this inquiry, the fourth part of our inquiry into secondary education this year, when Ofsted said more or less that they did not really get into admissions. It did strike me as funny at the time because here you are, this inspectorate which we all expect to help drive up standards in schools and we had a witness only last week from a school in London who found that until he had special permission a few years ago to change the balance of intake of his pupils, he had very great difficulty getting out of a cycle of decline. He received special permission to take 40 above average, 40 average and 20 below average pupils and he said that gave him the opportunity. The illustration I am putting to you is that there is a relationship between school admissions and how well schools can and cannot achieve. Without further ado, would you like to say something to dispel the feeling that you are not interested in school admissions because they do not have anything to do with school achievement?

Mr Bell: Thank you very much, Chairman. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Ofsted and the Audit Commission have always looked at part of the LEA inspection programme, at admissions and school place planning. However, our recent report, as you have suggested, started to pick up some of those wider issues in relation to school improvement and other factors. In relation to admissions our inspection evidence suggests that this service is at least satisfactory in the vast majority of authorities and is in fact judged to be highly satisfactory in over half of the authorities inspected. We have identified a number of factors recently which have contributed to this improvement in the way in which local authorities deal with admissions, for example, the development of the admissions forum, which is a new requirement on LEAs to bring together the different admissions authorities in an area. In respect of school place planning, again we would say that the overall performance of local authorities is sound. It is fair to say that the complexity of this area of work appears to make it difficult for local authorities to perform at the highest level. It is the case that most LEAs have now taken effective action in relation to the supply of school places. Surplus capacity in the primary sector has been reduced through effective action on the part of local authorities but of course there are other issues in relation to school place planning which go beyond simply supply and demand. We have seen evidence that local authorities are linking together school improvement and school place planning strategies, but there was limited evidence of this contributing to raising standards. One of the most important points we have made is in relation to school organisation plans, which all local authorities must produce, because actually we felt in a number of cases they lacked a clear exposition of the LEA's strategy. It is obvious, but worth re-stating, that school place planning and admissions are highly charged issues. For parents the issue of where children go to school is of major concern and can arouse very strong emotions. As we have highlighted in our recent report, it is not altogether straightforward. It is important - and I would want to stress this point - that, in managing supply and demand for school places, councils' freedom for manoeuvre is significantly constrained. The fundamental principles of parental preference and individual school autonomy, which underpin legislation, are difficult at times to reconcile with efficient central planning at the level of a local education authority. Moreover, the task for local authorities in planning school places is one which touches on political, economic and social policy at all levels. That is not a counsel of despair for councils. Changes in government policy and legislation in recent years have strengthened the hand of councils. For example, the removal of grant maintained status has removed that as one potential escape route for schools facing closure. In addition, the admissions code of practice and the requirement on admissions authorities to work together has been an important factor as well. We would say that there are still issues which remain unresolved, in particular using school place planning to promote the improvement of schools standards more actively. Issues do remain, for example the increasing polarisation between popular and unpopular schools, the weakest and least popular schools often serving some of the most vulnerable and disaffected groups of pupils. Of course councils which provide support for such schools do need to put their work for individual schools in the context of a wider corporate plan for school place planning and education more generally. It might all seem an intractable problem and it does require a high degree of partnership and persuasion. I would just emphasise that point again. The amount of prescription which can be brought to bear on this area is circumscribed by legislation and therefore it is important that local authorities take on a partnership, an influencing role to enable all players to play a role in the provision of places for all pupils. In the conclusion of our report, we did highlight a number of issues which we think are worth further examination, including looking at local authority housing and planning policies in relation to school place planning, looking at issues in relation to inclusion of pupils with special needs and so on; undoubtedly important issues to look at. I would just conclude by saying that admissions and school place planning are highly charged issues which do not lend themselves to simple or easy solutions.

 

Q601  Chairman: Thank you; that is an excellent introduction. We would agree with that last note you sounded, that there is no easy solution to the problems we have been looking at over these last few weeks. Can we push you a little on the relationship between what government will and will not allow? When you conducted your inquiry with the Audit Commission, did you pick up on the notion that banding, or a system of fair banding, would be valuable to particular schools in order to solve some of the problems, particularly of the lower performance schools?

Mr Bell: May I just ask Nick to draw upon some of the evidence we found during our study?

Mr Flight: We did not look specifically at banding across all the authorities which are using that. One of the authorities we visited as part of the thematic inspection, did use banding as a means of allocating places. It was one of the London boroughs, which continued to use the old ILEA system which it had been using for some considerable time. Our view was that in that particular case it was working well and it did indeed bring about a more balanced intake than would have been the case otherwise. We did not have the evidence through looking at the operation of banding in a whole series of authorities to come to a view as to the overall success or otherwise of that system.

 

Q602  Chairman: As you looked at the evidence in the thorough way you did, did you find, certainly the Committee is getting the feel, that on the one hand there is a group of - not to be cruel - administrators who are desperately searching for a more rational way of allocating the school places and organising admission, that the pan-London initiative which is being developed and piloted at the moment is one part of that. On the other is a whole group of people who see that the advantages of that might have some real political disadvantages because it might restrict choice for some people who at the moment, by understanding the system or working the system, get far greater choice. Did you pick up on the balance between those two?

Mr Bell: Yes, you are right to describe the dilemma in the way you did. What we did not find was people saying this is completely unworkable, we cannot do it, we cannot make this work. We did not find that but we did find councils in particular saying that they recognised the limits of what they could do, using power, but actually recognised the extent to which they had to use persuasion to have others working with them for the common good. You might say that is all very well, but what happens if persuasions fails? That is the system we have at the moment and we have seen examples of where local authorities, working with schools and working with other admissions authorities can actually make sense of what is there at the moment. I just want to say that it is not an absolutely dire or desperate situation, there is a genuine set of policy choices here which faces government in relation to the powers of councils against the decisions or preferences of individual parents and people just have to make that work on the ground at the moment.

Chairman: Thank you for those opening answers.

 

Q603  Mr Chaytor: Whose initiative was it that started this investigation off? Was it Ofsted, was it the Audit Commission or were you asked to carry out the inquiry by the department?

Mr Bell: Ofsted and more particularly the Audit Commission have had an historic interest in school place planning over a series of reports, very important reports. There was a view that this was an issue between Ofsted and the Audit Commission which would repay further attention. Going back to the Chairman's point earlier, perhaps it was trying to go just a little beyond what we gather from our own evidence - yes, we have evidence about admissions; yes, we have evidence about school place planning - and trying to put that into a broader context.

Q604  Mr Chaytor: Has the government ever suggested to Ofsted that there ought to be some systematic inquiry into the impact of admissions policies or the relationship between admissions policies and achievement?

Mr Bell: No, not in my time as Chief Inspector.

 

Q605  Mr Chaytor: In the report you give a figure for surplus school places of 8.6 per cent, which is an improvement over the five-year period. You also say that overcrowding in schools rose during that five-year period from 2.6 per cent to 3.6 per cent, so there is a paradox here. We have an increasing number of schools which are overcrowded, but overall we have a reduction in surplus places. Do you think those figures are about right, because 8.6 per cent would seem quite high to people looking from the outside? How do we deal with this paradox of surplus places overall, but increasing amounts of overcrowding in particular schools?

Mr Bell: I will ask Nick Flight to deal with the issue of the percentage against the overcrowding, but I would make the point about the percentage of surplus places. There has really been concerted action on the part of successive governments to remove surplus capacity from the education system; that has been really ongoing for ten to 15 years. Most councils have the message on that one. The figure is not necessarily surprising, given the pressure to move surplus places over many years.

Mr Flight: The overcrowding figure relates particularly to secondary schools and in the last five or so years, or slightly longer, numbers in secondary schools have been rising and local education authorities have found there that there is real pressure and there are particular hot spots. Those figures are not particularly surprising given the demographic trends of the last few years and in that context they are not particularly unreasonable.

 

Q606  Mr Chaytor: Are you saying that is more or less acceptable and the best we can do under the circumstances? To put it another way: should the object of policy be to reduce the level of overcrowding further and the level of surplus places further or do you think we have reached a satisfactory balance?

Mr Flight: What those figures mask is the variation between local authorities. In a sense what is important is that in some local authorities the inspection evidence is that they have not grasped the nettle of surplus places sufficiently; in others, they have done very well on those matters. Likewise with regard to secondary overcrowding, some authorities are in real difficulties on that and others are not. It is difficult to draw too hard and fast a conclusion from the overall figures.

 

Q607  Mr Chaytor: In terms of the levers the government has at its disposal are there particular incentives or particular combinations of carrots and sticks which government can use with local authorities and local authorities can use with schools?

Mr Bell: I am sure that is a question you will want to put to DfES officials when they come before you, but it is certainly the case that over time, pressure to remove surplus places has been accompanied with options to access new funding for further developments. One can see the logic of that kind of approach, that some incentive has to be given to councils to do this because it is difficult to remove surplus places. That has been the traditional approach to removing surplus places, but in a sense giving authorities some incentive to do so.

 

Q608  Mr Chaytor: Is there a case for increasing the incentives available to further refine the balance in the system?

Mr Bell: It is a very interesting one when it comes to surplus places in general. At the tail end of our last meeting I made the point that if you remove surplus places too much you remove a degree of flexibility within the system. There is always this question of how many surplus places you require in the system to enable preference to be expressed and choice exercised. Nick may have a view from the Audit Commission but I think there has been this working assumption that if you get much beyond ten per cent or thereabouts we really are beginning to waste money. That is the other point we should make, that if you have an excess of surplus capacity, arguably you are tying up money in places which are unfilled when that money could be used to fund the education of children who are actually in schools. Nick may have a view on that percentage figure.

Mr Flight: Very similar. Anything above ten per cent is a cause for some concern; within inspections it is the trigger for further investigations as to why the figure was at that higher level. Since the report the Audit Commission did about just these issues back in the mid-1990s, Trading Places, which you might be familiar with, it has often been asked what level of surplus places it would recommend all authorities should be aiming for. We have resisted actually saying that there is an ideal percentage of surplus places for all authorities, because this situation does vary very considerably between rural county and a quite tight-knit metropolitan borough.

 

Q609  Mr Chaytor: Your report refers to the impact of lack of co-ordination within local authorities, between different departments, housing, planning, education. You indicate that in some circumstances this has led to severe problems for schools and even schools failing. Could you elaborate on that and maybe give us examples of where this has been the case?

Mr Bell: I think the one which is often cited, and Nick may have other examples, is where a decision is moved to depopulate an area on the back of a housing policy, which then has fairly dramatic and immediate effects on the pupils, because the families move away from the area as houses are demolished. That is not to say there are not often good reasons for councils taking those actions, but it is important that such decisions, say about housing policy, are not taken in isolation so that the effects on education and schools are properly understood.

 

Q610  Mr Chaytor: Is there a specific recommendation in the report which will deal with that?

Mr Flight: The report does recommend that the different parts of the council work more effectively together. That is quite an important theme within the report, of making sure that school place planning is regarded as a whole council issue and not just simply something for the education department. As David says, housing policies can have an impact on school intakes and therefore on school performance.

 

Q611  Mr Pollard: In my constituency of St Albans we do not have any spare places at all; we are absolutely choc-a-bloc. That means to say that there must be lots more with higher than 8.6 per cent. I just worked out that if we were 8.6 per cent, we would have 136 places in our system and that would give a huge amount of choice which many parents would welcome. Are we not getting to the point where we are driving them too far? If you look at public schools, their class sizes are down at 25. Should we not be aiming for smaller class sizes? Once you take capacity out of the system, it is gone for ever and houses get built on it or something else happens.

Mr Bell: I suppose the second part of your question is more a question of political choice that it is for inspection. As far as the first point is concerned, it would probably be inappropriate to have a nationally determined figure, because the circumstances in your constituency might be quite different from the circumstances elsewhere. Presumably what one should say is that all councils should be alert to their own particular circumstances and plan school places accordingly.

 

Q612  Mr Pollard: We dodge about every year and one village in my constituency is being disadvantaged this year because of the change in the longest distance journey criterion. Each year we change from village to village saying this year this one is being disadvantaged. If we had a few more places we would all be happy.

Mr Bell: To some extent that is one of the local peculiarities, and one might say rightly so, of admissions policies, because it would be quite wrong to sit in London and say this is the admissions policy for all schools in all circumstances and all parts of the country. There has really always been a responsibility on admissions authorities to consult, if they are proposing to make changes to their admissions arrangements, so that people will have their say.

Q613  Helen Jones: May I take you back to what you said earlier about the relationship between education policy and other council policies such as housing and planning? You ask in your report for better liaison between the different parts of local education authorities, but can you tell the Committee whether you believe that will be enough to resolve the problems, given in fact that we still have schools who are their own admissions authorities? It is not really within the hands of the LEAs, is it?

Mr Bell: It goes back to what I said about the partnership arrangements and admissions authorities, as you rightly point out, exist in a number of forms and a number of varieties and in some number in places. In those circumstances, where the law has given those authorities the rights they have, then what you can expect, what one should expect, is those bodies to work together. There is increasing evidence, partly because councils' powers have been strengthened, that people are taking the view which goes beyond the boundaries of their own school, if they are a single school admissions authority, and looking at the impact more generally. It goes back in a sense to the practicalities of making the system we have at the present time work.

 

Q614  Helen Jones: I understand what you say but your report did find that relationships with other admissions authorities could be quite unsatisfactory in a number of cases. Given that, what would your view be, simply in terms of planning education, about all schools becoming their own admissions authorities? Do you think that is workable? Do you think it would benefit educational attainment?

Mr Bell: It would be very complex indeed because we know that there are some students who do not easily fit in the system. For example, we highlighted one of the areas for further work as the impact of admissions policies on pupils with special educational needs. One would have to be very careful about thinking through all the implications of school admissions if they were delegated to the level of the individual school. The argument might be put that there is a fair number of schools which are already their own admissions authorities and that seems to work, notwithstanding what you said about unsatisfactory relationships. If one moved to a situation where every school was its own admissions authority, one would still envisage having some kind of body holding the ring as it were. How would you deal with those clashes between admissions authorities? How would you deal with the needs of individual students who do not necessarily easily fit into the system? How would you manage issues to do with ensuring that all children actually had a school place? There could be an issue that all the admissions authorities act in a particular way and some children were left out of the system. I am not saying, because it is not a decision for me to make, whether there should be one or many admissions authorities, but I think there would still be outstanding issues which would be on the level of the individual school, even if one moved to a position where all schools were their own admissions authority.

 

Q615  Helen Jones: May I then put to you the opposite case? Have you found any evidence of this? You talked about the consequences for schools of, for instance, depopulating an area. Did you look in your report at the other extreme, where there has been a lot of house building and therefore there is pressure on schools? Did you find any evidence that schools were selecting the students rather than the students selecting the schools?

Mr Flight: Our inspection evidence relates very much to LEAs and the operation by LEAs of their admission criteria. Our work did not involve looking in any detail at all at individual schools and being able to make a comment on the extent to which individual schools were choosing pupils to suit themselves. We do not have evidence on that. Coming to the bigger question you put, which was about the opportunities in the situation of rising rolls, for local authorities to be quite innovative and to take advantage of that opportunity of having to provide more places to re-order their provision. There was an example within the report of an authority where they took the opportunity to close one school, to re-open it on a new site, to expand two or three other schools and to re-orientate their provision with a very specific view as to what that could do to raise standards across those schools. It is probably easier, there are greater opportunities to do that kind of thing in a situation of rising rolls rather than falling rolls where you are having to take places out of use.

 

Q616  Mr Turner: You have made 15 recommendations and judging by what you have said there are some fairly extreme examples, such as if an elderly council estate is demolished clearly it will depopulate a school. You have talked about the waste of money inherent in surplus places, but could you tell me the educational evils which those 15 recommendations are designed to abate?

Mr Bell: The second key point for action is where we talk about taking deliberate steps to improve unpopular schools. That seems to me to be directly related to the issue of potential under-achievement and schools being perceived not to be very successful by parents. That is an important issue in this report. We were not saying, as perhaps some of the coverage suggested, that there is never a case for expanding schools which are popular; we never argued that. What we did say was that that in itself would not necessarily bring about change or improvements in schools which were unpopular. We gave a very clear message in this report that councils have to take deliberate action to improve standards in schools where the standards are too low. That is a very direct relationship to educational attainment. I would also make the point about inclusion and pupils with special educational needs. Looking at the impact of policies on pupils with special educational needs and ensuring that they are well catered for seems to me to be another important element of an education strategy.

 

Q617  Mr Turner: Yes, but you have not actually disclosed what is wrong, that is not working under the present system. I accept schools have to be improved, but what is it about admissions policies that makes it difficult to improve schools?

Mr Bell: That specific point was less to do with admissions policies and more to do with school place planning issues. It seemed to me that on school place planning grounds one could say "Let us just expand popular schools; they are popular and parents recognise them, choose them and so on". If that is the policy and that alone is the policy, it seems to me to leave major issues in relation to those children who attend schools which are less popular and where perhaps the education is not that good. That seems to me to be a school place planning issue rather than directly a schools admission issue. Or, of course, clearly if you open up more popular schools to more children, then there is an issue of how you select those children by the admissions criteria and so on.

 

Q618  Mr Turner: May I take you to paragraph 31 where you say restrictive criteria "... can exacerbate social tension, once they divorce a school from its local community". What is your evidence for that?

Mr Flight: This was referring to the situation in one of the local authorities we visited where the school had admissions criteria which resulted in it taking a very tiny proportion of its pupils from within the area in which it was situated. That was a significant issue for the people living in that community and something which the LEA felt did have an impact on its social inclusion policies. That was one particular example.

 

Q619  Mr Turner: Social tension is more than an absence of social inclusion, is it not?

Mr Flight: Yes; indeed.

 

Q620  Mr Turner: So what is the social tension?

Mr Bell: It is clearly evidenced that people in the local community were very concerned that there was a school in their community which very few local youngsters were able to attend. One of the things we do not say in paragraph 31 - and I am pleased that you cited that - is that because of that particular admissions criteria it is therefore wrong. We actually say, if we are talking about voluntary aided or foundation schools, potentially faith schools, they have had an historic obligation to serve beyond their own boundaries and that is fine. What we are trying to highlight there is that potential tension between, on the one hand, the admissions authority acting in good faith against its own mission and on the other hand the local community thinking they cannot get access to this school. It is right for us to highlight that without saying one approach is right or the other approach is wrong. There is another example of policy tensions between schools serving the local community on the one hand and schools with a wider admissions policy, perhaps related to a faith background and so on.

 

Q621  Mr Turner: On the recommendations in paragraph 34, you refer to restrictive admissions again. Clearly any admissions criteria are designed to be restrictive, are they not, because they are designed to choose pupils?

Mr Bell: Yes. Clearly your admissions criteria determine the basis on which you will admit pupils to the school and those are obviously particularly relevant, whether you have more pupils applying for places than there are places available. What we highlighted here - and this is something which local authorities and other admissions authorities said to us - was that in some cases there can be practices which perhaps do seem to disadvantage one group of pupils or another or may not necessarily let enough pupils from the local area come in and so on. Examples were given to us of restrictive admissions arrangements which we felt local authorities should at least look at and potentially challenge.

Mr Flight: Yes, I would agree that is the case. There are also issues that local authorities have to consider in relation to the appropriateness of admissions criteria under the code of practice and whether those are being fairly applied, whether individual schools are operating fair criteria.

 

Q622  Mr Turner: But even within the code of practice, all admissions criteria advantage one group and disadvantage another group where a school is oversubscribed, do they not?

Mr Bell: By definition you might say that if a school is saying it has something to do with local children as opposed to children who live far away, you might describe that as restrictive but within the bounds of the regulations that is quite reasonable. What the admissions code of practice does is identify those elements of admissions arrangements which may be considered less fair. That is what Nick was citing. You are absolutely right of course: admissions will highlight particular characteristics which need to be promoted.

 

Q623  Mr Turner: Could I take you to paragraph 61, deliberately and artificially limiting the percentage of pupils from one ethnic group cuts across the principle of local schools serving their local communities. You give that as a reason for rejecting that sort of criterion. That would be true if you substituted the words "social class" for "ethnic group", would it not?

Mr Bell: I am not entirely sure what point you are making.

 

Q624  Mr Turner: There has been some suggestion during our evidence sessions that schools which have a preponderance of one social class have something wrong with them educationally. You have rejected the idea of deliberately limiting concentration of an ethnic group in a school and I am asking you whether you would reject the idea of deliberately limiting the concentration of one social class in a school.

Mr Bell: In some ways we are back to the question about banding which was raised earlier. It is a difficult one in some ways for me to comment on, because that really is a matter of policy. What I would say is that I am not persuaded that such limits on social class or background as suggested are sensible, frankly.

 

Q625  Chairman: I get the impression that you are treading on egg shells, you are very nervous. After all, you are Ofsted. We have had academics in front of us, we have had people from think tanks who believe that a selective admissions system for all the children in one local education authority actually delivers an inferior service across the piece. It might advantage the third of children who go to a selective school, but overall there has been evidence both from PISA and from the academics we have had in front of us, that that does not deliver. Surely your remit in Ofsted should make you less timid. If children are getting less good education than they otherwise would, you should be the champion, should you not? You should be saying to ministers that the evidence out there is that most children get a worse deal in a selective system.

Mr Bell: That in itself is a contestable proposition.

 

Q626  Chairman: It is a hypothesis. I am saying, if that were the evidence. Why do we have academics saying this and Ofsted too timid to say anything of the kind?

Mr Bell: I have been described as many things, but timid is perhaps not one of them. As far as what you have said about the makeup of a school is concerned and that determining the success of the school, that is not correct. There are schools serving disadvantaged communities, which are doing a first-rate job for their students and there are schools which serve very advantaged communities which do not do such a good job for the students. I would not come in front of you and say the evidence suggests that if you have the social composition of this sort in a school it is destined for failure. Certainly not. What we would recognise and we have said this publicly and said it again last year in the annual report, is that some schools face greater difficulties than others where you have a concentration of students, where attitudes to education are not positive, where parental support is lacking. I would be very nervous indeed about suggesting that schools could not be good schools just because of the social makeup of the community they serve.

 

Q627  Jonathan Shaw: Do you ever find in your inspections that there are schools completely flouting the admissions criteria, the code of practice?

Mr Bell: It is not something that Ofsted would look at in relation to school inspection. We do not look in detail at that. It is not something we have the evidence to comment on. This study did not take us further on that and we would not get down to the level of detail, the general work on LEA inspection, looking at school admissions.

Q628  Jonathan Shaw: Do you think it is something you might look at in the future, given the changing role of Ofsted with the Green Paper?

Mr Bell: We have had this conversation before about how much Ofsted is asked to do in an inspection. I think we would resist it and I shall say why. It would divert us from what we should really be doing.

 

Q629  Chairman: We probably ask this question because every time you come before us your empire has grown.

Mr Bell: You must have been here in spirit at the last meeting because that point was made frequently. I will tell you why I do not think we should do that. I think that is to focus on the process side of school performance and less on what that school is doing with the pupils it has. We are then back to the danger that we are starting to make assumptions about what the pupils can achieve in that school because they come from a particular background. I believe that is very dangerous indeed.

Ms Brown: As we move towards children's services and the inspection of children's services and the whole way in which different departments within a council and agencies work together for the benefit of children and young people, though we will not necessarily look specifically at the admissions policies of individual schools, the experience and the outcomes for those individual children and young people and particularly vulnerable young people will be part of the whole perspective. In a sense, we will be getting at it from a different end of the telescope.

 

Q630  Jonathan Shaw: That was the point I wanted to expand on. An admissions policy may well impact upon children in public care. Children in public care, as we have heard from the Chief Adjudicating Officer, is number one for surplus places. If you are inspecting a school which does have a history of surplus places and has consistently said no, we are not going to take children in public care, that impacts upon the rest of the services and the opportunities for the most vulnerable children. Surely, in the future, that is something you are going to have to look at.

Ms Brown: Inspections of LEAs at the moments do comment on the provision made by the LEA in terms of supporting children and young people who are looked after, children who have been in public care. We already have the base line for that in terms of LEAs' performance, so it would link very nicely.

 

Q631  Jonathan Shaw: That is the LEA, but obviously it is difficult to be so prescriptive for every single school and issues do arise, particularly where schools are their own admissions authorities. What I am wanting to discuss is the point that if we are going to create opportunities for children who are number one in terms of surplus places according to the adjudicator and schools are continuing you flout that and you find that, will you make a comment on that? Will you say that, especially given you wider role? You surely cannot operate in silos, because that is the whole point of the Green Paper, that you have to be part of the glue which joins it all together. Mr Bell: Exactly. There is certainly greater focus in the new inspection framework on the educational outcomes of different groups of pupils. If such children were in the school, there is a better opportunity to look at what is happening. You are making the point that that is all very well, but they cannot get into the school.

 

Q632  Jonathan Shaw: Absolutely.

Mr Bell: Then I think we are back to Sheila's point about trying to use our joined-up responsibilities to find out what is happening. One way of getting at that, for example, is if there is going to be a focus on the opportunities for children in public care. Generally in our work we would begin to tease out what happens to these children, where they go to school, what kind of experience they have had when they or their surrogate parents have turned up and said they wanted a place. You are absolutely right, that there is an opportunity to get at that through our wider responsibilities, but probably in the main not through the inspection of individual institutions.

 

Q633  Jonathan Shaw: I suppose that is right for surrogate parents. What ability will you be looking at? What demands does the local authority make on behalf of the children in their care to get into the best school or does it just collude with the education department and say they will go to the school which all the kids in public care go to because there is a surplus of places. It is not going to challenge to make sure the school does follow the code of practice.

Mr Bell: Again one would emphasise the kind of partnership rules to that; schools working together would say that they all have a responsibility to those children. You are right, we have an opportunity, through this new approach, to find out what is happening to particular groups of vulnerable children. Children in public care are a great example. These are children who have done abysmally in the education system historically and it seems to me to be only right that we use what mechanisms we have to find out what is happening to them in the future.

Jonathan Shaw: I am very pleased to hear that. We had a very eminent head teacher of a very successful school before the Committee and he said that his school had never considered - very openly which is very helpful and refreshing that we hear that - the issue of surplus places for children in care. It is certainly out there.

 

Q634  Valerie Davey: We have covered some of my questions but I should like to go straight to the issue of the LEAs and their remit as admissions authorities. Do you have any evidence from your inspections of LEAs that they have systems which are either more effective in improving standards in schools or more detrimental in that factor?

Ms Brown: In terms of education standards, not in relation to admissions?

 

Q635  Valerie Davey: Yes; in terms of the admissions policy they use. What relationship does it have to the standards attained by all those children for whom they are responsible? Are there some admissions policies which are better than others?

Ms Brown: Certainly the findings for last year's inspections - and Nick has looked at this in more detail - indicate that LEAs are better at making the link in terms of their strategies, in terms of the pieces of papers. When they are planning they make the link between school place planning and admissions policies and school improvement, but we found it more difficult to identify where that was actually having an impact. From my reading of things, I should be interested 12 months from now, when the new code of practice is more embedded and the expectations on an LEA are being fulfilled in a more coherent fashion, to see whether in fact we can see that. Currently we do not see much evidence of it.

 

Q636  Valerie Davey: Do you have any guidance to give local authorities when you are discussing during their inspection their admissions policy? What do you say to them? What issues are raised on admissions on those inspections?

Mr Flight: During the inspection of LEAs in terms of the criteria they use we found very few examples of unfair criteria or criteria which appear to be working against the educational interests of the pupils of the area. The inspection evidence is that generally LEAs do operate fair criteria. Even when all the criteria are fair, that does not necessarily solve the problem. If a school is oversubscribed, you change the criteria, you get a different set of unhappy people. The important thing and what we therefore look at in inspections is to make sure they are fair, transparent and are properly explained to parents. That is another very important part of the inspection process: parents need to know exactly what it is that the LEA is going to do when they allocate places and the explanation of it is important.

 

Q637  Valerie Davey: That does not cover the attainment of those children, does it? How are you looking and what evidence do you have that one system or another ensures that there is a wider attainment by all young people as opposed to some doing very well or others not doing very well? Or is it easier in an authority where the LEA is the only admissions authority as opposed to where it is one of five or ten?

Mr Bell: I would have thought - and I am happy to hear what colleagues say on this - that it is quite difficult and would be quite difficult to demonstrate a causal link between the admissions policy and the outcomes achieved by the pupils. I just need to think that through, but it would be quite difficult to find the evidence which would support the admissions policy in a direct impact on how students learn and the quality of students' learning. We do know that lots of in-school factors then start to come into play about how students learn. I would have to be quite honest with you and say we do not have that link and aspirations are laid out in policy and strategy documents, but that is quite different from being able to see what impact this is having and finding the evidence you are looking for. I shall have to go away and think about that one, but I have my doubts.

Chairman: Some members would like to push you a little on that.

 

Q638  Valerie Davey: If you come back to saying, as Ofsted has clearly done, that these are the characteristics of a good school and this is what is going to lead to attainment, for all children, not just for a minority, then surely the admissions policy is an element in ensuring that there are more schools like that, not fewer, within an LEA.

Mr Bell: If you take Nick's point that one can demonstrate with admissions policies that they are clear, they are transparent, they are fair and so on - and that is not unimportant of course; it is important that people have confidence in the admissions systems and that can have an impact - that is quite different from saying that you can demonstrate that as a result of these admissions criteria pupils achieve better things in schools. I just think that is very difficult to do.

Valerie Davey: Fair to whom? I have heard this word and it stands out very clearly and it is very important. To whom is a particular admissions policy fair?

 

Q639  Chairman: For example, when you look at Kent and 18 months ago, there is fair which is fair because it is open, transparent and all the rest, for those people in a selective system, but if you take something which has not only a selective system but then a system of specialist schools, some of which are taking ten per cent on aptitude, what does that say to you as a chief inspector about those schools which the rest of the kids go to? In other words, one third perhaps go to the selective system, people going off to the specialist schools with some degree of selection and what we are asking in a sense is what Ofsted says about the quality of education for those children who do not go into the selective system.

Mr Bell: We said very publicly at the time we were asked to provide data on Kent that it was not for us to get into the locally determined questions of what policies the council adopted. Our evidence suggested that Kent had amongst some of the highest performing schools in the country and had some low performing schools. Even within those groups there was variation in performance. It is a bit of a leap then to go from that to say that is all to do with the admissions criteria of the selective system in Kent. That seems to me to be a debate of a different order altogether. One could look at a lot of systems which are not selective and still see that very wide range of pupil attainment in schools. We have to be careful we do not jump to conclusions on the basis of what appears to be evidence which supports the line of argument, very cautious in that respect. We were very open in what we said in Kent schools and nobody disputed that because it came from our inspection evidence and the evidence of the performance in tests and examinations of Kent pupils.

The Committee suspended from 5.06pm to 5.16pm for a division in the House.

 

Q640  Jeff Ennis: Following this particular thing, and I accept what David has already said about every school being judged on its own merits in terms of performance and we cannot generalise too much, but we have already heard evidence that of the top 200 state schools the average number of pupils on free school meals at those top 200 state secondary schools is three per cent and the national average is 17 per cent. We do not have figures for the bottom 200 state schools, but I guess, off the top of my head, I would be safe in saying that the number of children on free school meals in those schools would be a lot higher than the 17 per cent. Looking at admissions policies and trying to make every school in the country a good school, should LEAs and other admissions authorities be looking at trying to establish some sort of federation system to try to address these issues or a fair banding system? Are there any models of that sort which you think we could recommend to try to make every school a good school? Basically, are pupils on free school meals being discriminated against in terms of the admissions authority and what can authorities do in looking at federations of schools or fair banding systems to try to ameliorate that situation?

Mr Bell: There is no evidence that pupils on free school meals are being discriminated against, although I would not dispute the data you suggest. I have to repeat the point that we should not ever get to a situation where we say, if pupils are of this background or that background they cannot achieve. From my perspective that is the road to ruin and we should always have those high ambitions. I was very interested that you picked up the federation point. I might have said the last time I was here that we are probably in some virgin territory when it comes to federation arrangements, schools working together, some very exciting and very interesting examples of that happening. We just have to wait and see. What it is really important is the kind of principle which underpins that approach and that is all schools being responsible for all pupils. That is a powerful, powerful argument in an area where schools, however successful or not so successful they are, do recognise that they do have a responsibility to other schools. That might be evidenced by offering courses to students from more than one school, it might be evidenced by students working together, teachers swapping over, school management teams working together. That is a very powerful move, but it is early days and this might be an issue of federations and schools working together that the Committee would return to and I am sure Ofsted will be looking at that very carefully.

 

Q641  Chairman: It is a systemic failure in many cases, is it not? When we went to Birmingham, the fact of the matter was that when you get to an inner city school it was not that every school had planned for a particular inner school to have the rough end of the deal, but you knew there was a school with excess capacity and you knew that school was going to get pupils who had been pushed out of other schools for poor behaviour, you knew that school was going to receive more special educational needs pupils, you knew that if there were political refugees settled in that city they were likely to be put into that school because it had capacity. We went to one school and in the middle of term there were 20 families applying to join that school on that day and the turnover was such in that one school that if you add all those up it is not a conspiracy, it is a systemic failure in one way, is it not?

Mr Bell: It would be hard to argue against that. We can all cite examples of schools where all these factors seem to conspire to make circumstances particularly difficult. One observation I would make is that some of those factors you described do go beyond the school gates, that they are not beyond the influencing of the local authority and other agencies. For example, if you take what you mentioned about refugee families, there are actions which can be taken, as we reported recently, which will assist. You are absolutely right to say that it becomes harder and harder, the more of those factors that come together. It does not seem to me then to be a case that such schools are hopeless and nobody can do anything about them, it just illustrates the fact that some of the interventions have to come from outside the school and not just from inside the school itself.

 

Q642  Chairman: To try to be an honest politician, I have to tell you that was George Dixon's school I was using which has been extremely successful in turning itself round and the head got a knighthood last year. Was it not you, or your immediate predecessor, who said to the Committee that they believed schools could only achieve so much, that it was 80 per cent external influences like family support and 20 per cent the school. Was it you?

Mr Bell: I think I might have said that, but that is not to cap the ambitions and aspirations, it was to make the point that successful schools work in a partnership with parents and others from outside the school gate. The example you cited illustrates that it is not impossible even for schools facing the most challenging circumstances to succeed. It is a reality that it is harder for many schools to succeed when those different factors come together. We always have this balance to strike. On the one hand I do not want to imply that schools can sort everything out for themselves, irrespective of what is going out, yet on the other hand, we must avoid the danger of consigning some children, some families, some schools to the scrap heap and saying there is nothing we can do within the school for them. That is in some ways an even greater danger.

 

Q643  Jeff Ennis: I was going to compare special educational needs children and the fact that a great weighting has been put on children in care being considered for school admissions. Would it be possible to have some sort of weighting system for schools which were actually not taking a fair proportion of children with special educational needs and how could we address that?

Mr Bell: That is a very interesting issue and to some extent the government opened this issue up in its recent policy paper on primary education, Excellence and Enjoyment, where it said that there is a perception abroad that if you are a school which is taking active steps to include children with special educational needs, somehow you are penalised, in particular in relation to performance tables. I think that was a recognition of a complex issue. It is not one of these ones which is easy. You could say let us not include children with special educational needs in any account of how the school is doing, because that might be fairer. On the other hand, that might be deeply damaging, if we imply that somehow children who have special educational needs are not capable of achieving. That is a really difficult one, but it is encouraging and I am very pleased to see that the government will be opening up a consultation on that issue: how do we best account for children with special needs, in a sense to incentivise schools to admit all children irrespective of their needs?

 

Q644  Jeff Ennis: I do not want to put words into your mouth, but from the responses you have already given, it appears to me that you feel because it is such a complex issue there needs to be some sort of central control mechanism to some extent. Whether that should be through the LEA or perhaps through these admission forums, which are only just becoming established, if issues like the ones I have raised to do with free school meals and special educational needs are not sorted out on a fair and equitable basis within an area, is there a need to beef up the existing role within LEAs or admission forums?

Mr Bell: It is always a difficult one in some ways. You encourage me to be bold in what I say but equally I have to take account of the reality as it is. For a range of other reasons, not least those related to school autonomy, we will not go back and probably should not go back to a system where everything was done by the man or woman in the centre, wherever the centre is. However, we can move from a situation where it is every school for itself, to a situation where, through local admissions fora and other bodies and ways of working, we get this expectation that all schools have a contribution to make to greater education. It is a bit of a blind alley then to say let us go back to central planning or central control of school admissions. That is not going to happen, as far as I can see, in the short term and we must not divert our efforts from making the system we have now work.

 

Q645  Jeff Ennis: It appears to me that you feel the actual role of LEAs in terms of the current admissions system is about right then.

Mr Bell: Our evidence would support that. Where LEAs take their work with other admissions authorities seriously, it can work well, yes. Equally, there are points for the future for LEAs to improve that, not just LEAs, actually other admissions authorities. It is really important to stress the point that we do not just have the one admissions authority. In lots of places we have a number of admissions authorities. Everyone has a responsibility to make this work.

 

Q646  Mr Pollard: I want to ask Nick Flight, as an auditor, whether the cost of appeals has been thought of. In my area we have hundreds of appeals every year, it costs an arm and a leg and it raises expectations. Could I ask whether 30 should be the maximum class size at any time, as we have done with primary school class sizes? That seems to have worked quite well and it would stop many of the appeals and bring costs down and that would mean more money going into front-line education.

Mr Flight: Limiting class sizes in secondary schools is a much, much bigger issue than limiting class sizes in years one to two. We have not done any research as to what the practicalities are about doing that. I am sure your point about the cost of appeals is absolutely pertinent. It is an expensive business. We do not have figures about that kind of detail on LEA expenditure. I believe you were asking the two directors, who were themselves unclear about the actual cost of appeals within their own education authorities. We have not collected that across the board.

 

Q647  Mr Pollard: Could you look at it?

Mr Flight: It would be interesting to know exactly how expensive this was.

Chairman: Will you think about it and write to us?

 

Q648  Jonathan Shaw: I want to touch briefly on organisational change and parental preference, grasping the nettle to close a popular school. You give examples of where you see good practice, councils, local authorities being proactive and taking difficult decisions. Obviously other authorities do not do that for a variety of reasons which we understand, political reasons, popularity; it is a very painful process closing a school, allowing schools to wither on the vine, which does happen. Can you tell the Committee whether that is commonplace?

Mr Bell: It is now less common, partly because of what we were saying earlier about the drive to remove surplus places. I think, for the reasons which Nick cited around this ten per cent figure, that it has concentrated the minds of LEAs and some more critical judgments which we have made about LEAs recently have been related to places where the nettle has not been grasped and it is clearly having an impact in terms of how money is well used. It is less common. You have rightly highlighted the great difficulties in any situation of closing a school. I cannot recall whether it is in this report or another we have published - - -

 

Q649  Jonathan Shaw: A school in East Brighton was given as an example to this Committee.

Mr Bell: Even when you close a school which is apparently unpopular, there is nothing more designed to galvanise public support than a proposal for closure and that is just a painful, painful business.

 

Q650  Jonathan Shaw: Should popular schools be required to expand to meet demand?

Mr Bell: I do not have any problem in principle with popular schools being allowed to expand, but of course that cannot be unlimited as far as I would see; just practicalities would say whether they can be allowed to expand. There is also an issue which is not often highlighted as much as it might be: is there a tipping point where the very reasons that people have chosen a school and it has become popular are then lost when it gets to a size beyond which nobody ever intended it to be? That is a practical issue. I just go back to the point we made in the report: no problem in principle with popular schools being used and expanded as part of our concerted school improvement strategy, but not if it means other schools being allowed to wither on the vine, withering on the vine in personal terms, when you think of the children and young people who have to continue to be educated in such schools.

 

Q651  Jonathan Shaw: If local authorities are so keen to make these strategic decisions, have local authorities sufficient powers to make decisions at an appropriate pace so the process is not too long and drawn out?

Ms Brown: Our findings of this last year's inspections were particularly interesting because over half of the LEAs we inspected this year were graded less than unsatisfactory in their first cycle of inspections. There are some key areas of improvement, one of them being around the leadership of senior officers and elected members and the speed and security of decision making which has significantly improved. We are finding that LEAs are much better now at making the key decisions and making those quickly, compared with what they were able to do in the first cycle. Our view would be that the powers are there and they are just much better at using them. In terms of political leadership, we are seeing the corporate activity of the LEA within the wider council has been more about community leadership, which comes back to some of the points members of the Committee were raising about a sense of having this shared responsibility across all the council's activities for the children, young people and families in their area. The decisions made within the LEA can have a significant impact on other services of the council and, equally, things like housing have an impact on what the LEA is able to do.

Jonathan Shaw: If you close a school it obviously impacts on a community.

 

Q652  Paul Holmes: We have talked about the problem that at one end you have parental choice and you have some schools selecting covertly or overtly. At the other extreme you have the schools which lose out. In paragraph 51 of your report, you talk about the schools which become sink schools and go into a spiral of decline; because they have spare places they must take all the pupils nobody wants and therefore they get worse and worse. You then say in paragraphs 55 and 56 that sometimes you just perhaps should not shut these schools anyway because you say that closing the school does not enhance a disadvantaged community. How do you square that circle, that if a school is into a spiral of decline, then the community it is in the middle of will be even worse if it loses the school? What is the answer to that? What do you recommend?

Mr Bell: There is no straightforward answer to that. This is an issue interestingly which plays out in both the urban and rural settings because the argument is often advanced in relation to rural schools that if you close the school you are going to have an enormous impact on the rest of the community. I do not think that it is easy to square the circle on this one. There are some circumstances, and local authorities do not do this lightly, but they have decided that everything else has not worked and it might be better to educate children just slightly further away from the local community. Equally, there are cases, and I visited schools and I am sure members of this Committee have visited schools, where everyone said that school was a goner, it was never going to recover and then something happens, perhaps a new head teacher, new sense of energy and vision around the school and you do not recognise it five years later; not even five years, three years later it can be a very different place. It is really, really difficult and any local authority which is making such decisions is trying always to weigh up those factors. To be very honest with you, I do not think local authorities have an easy answer, there is no simple answer to this one.

 

Q653  Chairman: What about the Archbishop Tennyson answer, that they had special permission to take the 40 above average, 40 average and 20 below? The head told us that turned the school round. Is that not a format? Is that not a system you approve of as Ofsted?

Mr Bell: Schools will sometimes say to you that their chances for improvement were enhanced when they had a more balanced intake, but I know from schools, even some I visited very recently, with exactly the same pupils, exactly the same intake of pupils, but the school has just been transformed. What the school has done in a sense is grow its own: it has actually developed better the characteristics, the attributes of the students who are there and made them achieve much more than they ever thought of achieving. It is not a panacea to say all you have to do is engineer the admissions to bring about school improvement. There are ways in which schools can improve without changing the admissions or changing the intake. Equally, as we have acknowledged, sometimes schools get beyond the point of recovery and then the decision of closure may well be the right one.

 

Q654  Paul Holmes: It might be interesting to get an Audit Commission comment on this one. If you are a parent and you are in a disadvantaged community and your local school is failing for whatever reason, you have a bit of a problem. Because you live in a disadvantaged community you are probably not that well off, but if you want to send your child to a school some distance away, which is seen as successful for whatever reason, you have to pay the transport costs yourself. Two thirds of LEAs will pay for children to go miles away to a faith school, but no local education authority will pay for children to go miles away to the specialist school which suits them or whatever. If specialist schools are to have any meaning, LEAs should be paying for kids to be going miles in different directions, passing each other to go to the sports college or language college or whatever. Equally, surely, in terms of fairness and opportunity, why are we paying for one group of children to go 10 or 15 miles to a faith school but not for other groups of children to go 10 or 15 miles to the a school that their parents would choose for them?

Mr Flight: The transport costs for LEAs are a really significant element in their education budget and the way in which they attempted to deal with that under quite severe financial constraints was to comply with their legal obligations. You draw attention to what is a real tension for LEAs in that to make a reality of parental preference for all parents, regardless of their income, would require considerable additional expenditure on school transport, which is a political choice, which it has not been possible for LEAs to take. It is quite true, that to make a reality of parental preference for everybody, regardless of income, would require considerable expenditure.

 

Q655  Chairman: Have you assessed Sir Peter Lample's ideas for introducing the American style school bus?

Mr Bell: We have just had a brief opportunity to look at his evidence. It looked very interesting but we have not had a chance to comment.

 

Q656  Valerie Davey: The City Technology Colleges had enough money to do their own buses. Would you suggest that if a school thought it was important enough, they would perhaps have to use some of that funding to get children to their school? Is it legal?

Mr Bell: As I understand it - and I will stand corrected - I think that school governors have the freedom to deploy their budgets in the interests or to the ends of the school. Schools' governors may in some circumstances say a group of their students is finding it very difficult to get to school and they will put on transport for them. That is an option, but presumably that is a local version of what Nick Flight just described as the choices you have to make in a time when budgets are tight.

 

Q657  Mr Chaytor: On the question of league tables and admissions, if it is misleading, as you argue, to use pupil intake as an excuse for a school being in the lower quartile of the league tables, is it not equally misleading to deny the impact of pupil intake as an explanation for a school being in the upper quartile of the league tables?

Mr Bell: I would not want to draw an absolute connection, is the point I am making.

 

Q658  Mr Chaytor: In your anxiety not to draw an absolute connection, do you feel you are being led to underestimate the reality of the impact? It is the 80/20 admissions. Where is the balance in a school's position on the intake between the value added by the school and the nature of the pupil intake.

Mr Bell: It is an important point we would stress through inspection, if I may just highlight that. We would want to use a variety of measures to judge the effectiveness of a school.

 

Q659  Mr Chaytor: In your inspection framework you do not consider a school's admissions policy.

Mr Bell: We do not consider the admissions policy, but increasingly we are considering the added value offered by the school. In the sense that one knows the starting point of the pupils, notwithstanding how the pupils got there via the admissions system, you are then in a position to judge the effectiveness of the school. I think that will be increasingly important information and it is not to deny the connection between deprivation and achievement; that is well documented. It is equally not to make an excuse of it because there are some schools serving very deprived communities which are doing an absolutely cracking job in offering their youngsters a really first-class education.

 

Q660  Mr Chaytor: Your report is extremely interesting, but it is limited to the 150 LEAs which are admissions authorities. In addition there are several hundreds of schools which are admissions authorities and you are making a virtue almost of not examining the impact of their admissions policies.

Mr Bell: I suppose we have to be realistic in what we do and we got at that second hand by looking at the work of LEAs in relation to many of those other admissions authorities. It is just being realistic about what we can do. It is important that Ofsted continues to focus on the quality of education being offered to the children in any particular school, rather than getting to other debates and discussions and inspection activity about how the children got there in the first place, notwithstanding the value of this kind of thematic report on an occasional basis.

 

Q661  Chairman: Children do not go to an individual school alone, they also go to school in a local education authority area and that can impact dramatically on the quality of the education they receive. Is that not right?

Mr Bell: Yes. We did highlight in our report looking at the impact of local education authorities, that the effectiveness of the local education authority is not always a strong determinant of the success of individual pupils and individual schools. That was something we talked to the Committee about a year or so ago.

 

Q662  Chairman: When I accused you of being a bit timid and said I wanted you to be more bold, I only want you to be more bold on the basis of your good research or your investigative skills, your inspections. If the inspections tell you something strongly which should be changed, then this Committee would expect you to declare willingly those changes which should take place without fear or favour or worry about our political masters.

Mr Bell: I have no such worries.

 

Q663  Chairman: Is there anything about admissions policy you would like to see changed, or would we be right to go away and say you are pretty happy with the situation as it is and nothing needs changing?

Mr Bell: I think we have demonstrated that the admissions arrangements can work well, provided local education authorities exercise their leadership responsibilities effectively and all admissions authorities - and if one wants in a sense to say schools, who are admissions authorities - recognise that they have a commitment to all pupils. In the end, that is a kind of moral imperative rather than a legislative imperative or anything which one could necessarily change just by changing Acts of Parliament.

 

Q664  Chairman: Is the Prime Minister right that faith schools get better results than non-faith schools?

Mr Bell: If you look at the data, there is no doubt that faith schools do a particularly good job, there is absolutely no argument about that on the basis of the data. We have looked at inspection evidence as well and there are some interesting trends there too. Yes, faith schools do offer a good education, but so do lots and lots of other schools in the country as well.

Chairman: Thank you very much and thank you very much for your attendance. We will see you soon.

 

Memoranda submitted by the Church of England Board of Education

and the Catholic Education Service

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: THE REVEREND CANON JOHN HALL, Chief Education Officer, Education Division, Church of England Board of Education and National Society and MR DAVID WHITTINGTON, National Schools Development Officer, Church of England Board of Education and MS OONA STANNARD, Director, Catholic Education Service and MS SARAH BILLINGTON, Legal Advisor, Catholic Education Service, examined.

 

Q665  Chairman: May I welcome Sarah Billington and Oona Stannard, John Hall and David Whittington? I am sorry you were kept waiting but the divisions have slowed us down rather today. It is a rather hectic session when we have to keep running to vote. You will know you have been nicely set up by me asking that last question to David Bell, but you must have been quite pleased with the answer. I want to get straight into this because we have a limited amount of time. It is said that only three per cent of the population of London go to church, any church, at the moment, half of those from the black community, yet you have all these schools. What on earth justification have you for such a tiny number of people going to church any longer, but you seem to have a vice-like grip on 17 per cent of the education of our children. Is that a reasonable thing to have at this moment?

Canon Hall: You need to bear in mind two historic realities: one is that the Church of England and the other churches were the founders of the education system in England, well ahead of the state getting in on the act. Because of decisions taken in 1870 and 1906 and so on, there we are still in partnership; we work in effective partnership. The second point is that I should like to draw attention to the national census results a couple of years ago which suggested that 72 per cent of the adult population of England in the privacy of their own homes described themselves as Christian. We have evidence from all kinds of opinion polls which suggests that somewhat over 50 per cent of the adult population in England regards themselves as either members of in some broader sense Church of England. I do not contest the particular data you offered on attendance at worship in London, because I do not have that to hand, but attendance at worship figures, though interesting in themselves, need to be handled with care and they certainly do not describe the whole position.

Ms Stannard: It would be fair to say that Catholicism is a minority religion in this country; it is about ten per cent of the population and we have about ten per cent of the schools. I would like to argue that there is a reasonable match there in terms of proportion rather than a vice-like grip.

 

Q666  Chairman: I always like to try to get you slightly on the back foot to start. Is there anything you would like to say briefly to the Committee about selection and your own schools before we get started?

Canon Hall: I should like to say that the Church of England's position is very clear about our schools: one is that they have a distinctively Christian character and the other is that they are open and inclusive to those who wish to send their children there as far as is possible. Distinctive and inclusive, there to serve the wider community, also there to nourish Christian children in their faith; that is the definition the Dearing report gave us in 2001, which the Church of England is entirely happy to adopt and did adopt very clearly at the General Synod. I have to say also that it reflects the historic commitment of the Church of England in terms of provision of schools. As I earlier indicated, when the National Society, which is one of the bodies I serve, was founded in 1811, it was to establish schools for the whole population.

Ms Stannard: The Catholic Church comes from a slightly different position in the sense of the schools we offer. It is worth setting in context that when we began our major provision of maintained Catholic schools in the 1850s, we were serving a largely disadvantaged and marginalised Irish community at that stage. Our tradition goes back in terms of serving disadvantaged communities. I hope you would agree that there is testament to the success of that in terms of where those communities are now. We believe that it is quite possible to have social inclusion which happens through very good collaborative work in all sorts of innovative partnerships and that our schools, coming from a world religion across races, will provide evidence that they are racially very diverse in those areas where there are diverse populations. The very high proportion of African children and children of Caribbean heritage in our schools surprises many people; in fact now more than those of Irish heritage. Our free school meal levels are on the same level as other community schools, so we would certainly say we are not socially selective either. It is fair to say that our central purpose is to provide an education in the faith for those of the faith. Thereafter, certainly where there are places available, we welcome those of other faiths and none, who seek to be educated with us. We are not therefore from that premise seeking an expansion either. We remain there firstly to serve Catholic pupils who want that sort of education, but at the same time are there to be an active part of the local community and to serve the wider needs. You will often hear us refer to the common good and that is a very important principle for us, certainly not to be isolationist in our schools.

Chairman: I think we are going to have a lot of confessions this afternoon about our denominations. I am an Anglican who sent all his children to Church of England schools. Helen, who is going to ask you a question now, is from a different background.

 

Q667  Helen Jones: I want to explore, if I may, the different policies of the churches in relation to expansion. The Church of England has taken a decision, as I understand it, to increase the number of Church of England secondary schools, where Oona Stannard has just told us that is not particularly the view of the Catholic Church, except where a need arises for education for Catholic children. Could you outline to us precisely why the Church of England has taken that decision? What do you think the effect will be on other schools in the neighbourhoods where you decide to expand? Then perhaps Ms Stannard could elaborate on why the Catholic Church takes a slightly different view.

Canon Hall: The current position as far as primary schools are concerned is that one in four schools in England is a Church of England school at primary level. At secondary level it is one in 20. That is very different from the position which Oona will outline for the Catholic Church, which is one in ten at primary and one in ten at secondary, broadly. That is simply historic. Until the 1994 Act we had elementary education, so right the way through to 14 and beyond the 1944 Act, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Church of England did not feel the need or the desire, or wish or the motivation to enlarge the number of secondary schools; other communities took different decisions at that stage. The result of that is that we have fewer than 200 secondary schools in England and they are scattered around in a very odd dispersal. There is quite a large number of them in London and in the North West, but there are whole reaches of the country without Church of England secondary education at all. Even in those schools which do exist we find very many heavily oversubscribed; not all. Incidentally we claim distinctiveness for our schools, not greater success. That is an important point to make. The Church asked Lord Dearing to chair a review of Church schools which ought to address this issue. It began its work in January 2000 and reported in June 2001 and I think members of the Committee were given a copy of the report. He outlined three things essentially: one is about distinctiveness and inclusion, very important; the second was about development of provision; the third was about the vocation to teach and how we can encourage more people to come into teaching from the Church's point of view. We have 200. What he said was expand by a further 100 over the next five or six years, or equivalent places to 100. It is big proportionately, but not massive in itself. What is absolutely fascinating is that in the two years or so since he reported and since the General Synod approved his report there has been a remarkable development. There are about 20 new secondary schools already opened, 15 clearly planned, a further 27 in mind and others being talked about. It does seem that it is a positive development, whose time has come, responding to a need. How is it actually happening? In some cases entirely new schools, in other cases community schools becoming Church of England schools by a process of closure and re-opening. As Lord Dearing challenged us and as we were very happy to be challenged, many of those are in difficult circumstances. They are not by any means, far from it, all in leafy areas. Do we have a policy, a plan, which says we want schools here, there and everywhere? We have not developed a very detailed plan of that sort, because we believe it needs to grow from the local community working together. It is not something we are imposing in terms of detail, far from it. It is growing up and bubbling up in local communities.

 

Q668  Helen Jones: I do not think you answered the second part of my question. How do you determine the effect on other schools in the neighbourhood when a Church of England school opens? The Committee would also be interested, arising from what you have said, to know how you judge the effect on a community. The community school closes down, for whatever reason, and re-opens as a Church of England school. What happens to the parents in that community who may not, for whatever reason, want their children to go to a Church of England school and have now lost the opportunity to send them to a state school nearby.

Canon Hall: Church of England maintained schools are of course state schools by definition. I thought I implicitly answered the question, but I am happy to do so explicitly.

 

Q669  Chairman: Helen is a lawyer as well as a teacher.

Canon Hall: That is helpful to know. In some cases it is where there are rising rolls and the LEA has determined there is a need for an additional school and the diocese has negotiated with the LEA and they have together agreed that such a development should happen. Certainly a few of them have arisen in those circumstances. I take for example Sunderland where the LEA and the diocese were working together. David Whittington was Director of Education for the Diocese of Durham in those days. They came to the conclusion that there was a need for additional places and looked to the Church to provide them. There are other cases where an existing community school has become a Church of England school without any change in any way at all, other than the head coming in new. All the pupils have remained there, the governors have been found places with a new governing instrument and perhaps the head is the only new person. There are others where the head has continued, has led the school into this new development and is leading the school as a Church school. That is what I meant by saying that it bubbles up from local circumstances. It must be the school community as well as the Church locally and the wider community, the LEA, everyone agreeing together that this is an entirely acceptable proper development. What we are not seeking to do is then to impose a restrictive admissions policy by any means, but to serve the local community as it is.

 

Q670  Helen Jones: Perhaps Ms Stannard could give us her view on that before I ask some supplementaries.

Ms Stannard: Voluntary aided schools are there in response to demand, not basic need. We do have 394 Catholic secondary schools across the country and they are generally as best as possible matched to where the populations are and we do have experience of closing schools as well, where the demographic trends have led that to be an appropriate move. That said, we do try very hard to maintain an inner city presence so that as demographic trends may have left inner cities at times in a fairly rapidly changing state, we want to be there whilst the community wants us there. We respect choice and diversity for all members of the population. Just as we appreciate in a pluralist society the respect for us having our own schools, we want the community at large to have the choice of schools they may wish. We perfectly accept that is not going to be Catholic schools for everyone, even though were that not the case, there would be all sorts of philosophical and, most importantly, practical reasons why we would not be seeking to have more schools than the Catholic community needs. Issues like how we staff our schools and maintain that particular character of schools is quite critical and relies on having teachers with the right experience and so on.

 

Q671  Helen Jones: May I ask you about admissions policies? As I understand it - and correct me if I am wrong - admission to Catholic schools depends on whether you were or were not baptised a Catholic in the first place. Many Church of England schools look at church attendance. We heard some evidence for it from Brian Jones, the former head of Archbishop Tennyson School, in a session last week. If I am correct in saying that - and we are talking about schools before they look at filling surplus places in this instance - what is the tension between serving the community as a whole and giving that preference? If either Church of England schools or Catholic schools look at church attendance, how far back do you go and how far can you stop parents manipulating the system by experiencing a sudden conversion 12 months before they want to get their child into a particular school?

Canon Hall: The situation with Church of England schools is that half of them are voluntary controlled and therefore subject to the local education authority's admissions policy. For the other half, the governing body develops its own admissions policy and some of them give some recognition to church attendance for some of the places. The story suggesting that admission to Church of England schools is on the basis of attendance is often oversold and that is perhaps a story derived from one or two particular accounts which got into the papers and from one or two schools people have extrapolated the much wider position. As you are aware from the guidance we have shown you that we have issued to the diocese, we are very clear that schools ought to have inclusion as part of their admissions policy and that they ought therefore to make at least some places available to those of other faiths and to those of no particular faith as well. What we are clear about is that it does no good. It is not right, nor is it good for its reputation, if a local school does not admit some local people, whether it is a Church school or not, according to parents' will. That is the official position. The vast majority of Church of England schools see themselves as, by varying devices, wanting to achieve that end. It may be that in a particular community, if we can take a primary school, there are two schools: one is a community school and one is a Church of England school. The Church of England school might be in the more affluent area of town and the community school might therefore be serving a more socially disadvantaged community. In practice, if the Church of England school has a policy which gives some preference to Christian practice, the very strong chance is that they will admit from the whole town rather than just from the immediate area around the school and it is our advice that they ought to consider very carefully, in their own particular circumstances, admissions policies which lead to inclusion in that kind of way.

Ms Billington: In terms of Catholic schools, the vast majority of the schools, taken over the country as a whole, do give preference to baptised Catholics as you suggest rather than look at practice.

 

Q672  Helen Jones: That is because you are not allowed to leave, is it not? You may lapse but not leave.

Ms Billington: In other parts of the country, where there is oversubscription by Catholics - and that is paticularly true in parts of the South East - then schools do look at practice and will seek a priest's reference. In terms of how far back they look, I cannot answer that very accurately, but I think they would be looking certainly at more than 12 months, perhaps a couple of years. Equally, we have to be mindful of not wishing to discriminate against people who have recently moved into an area or who have moved into the country. There has to be a degree of flexibility there in terms of that. The question about conversions of convenience is one which is quite emotive, but it is impossible to judge people's motives. If they are attending church for three years before the relevant age of the child, they may continue to do that afterwards, even if it was not their intention. It is not our job to examine the motives of the parents or to seek to close to the door of a Catholic education to a child who is a baptised Catholic and whose parents or carers have been practising, have been attending church. I am quite calm about that.

 

Q673  Helen Jones: If a Catholic school is oversubscribed, you are saying most schools look at practice rather than the geographical area. How do you stop that damaging other Catholic secondary schools? It is usually secondary schools we are talking about. Secondly, I should like to hear the criteria you think most schools use if they have surplus capacity once they have admitted Catholic children in their area?

Ms Billington: In terms of the criteria which they use if they have surplus places after taking the Catholic applicants, because each school is its own admissions authority my answer has to be fairly general. There is a split between those schools which have policies which give preference to families, to pupils who come from a faith background; that could be a background of any world faith, to show a sympathy with the concept of a faith school and a faith culture. There are other schools which do that by looking for practising Christians, Anglicans. We are moving away from that. Over the last four years or so, if you look at the trend, we have been moving away from giving preference to Christians over other world faiths and becoming more conscious of the need to reflect the diversity of the local community, which a world faith criterion does more accurately and that is what we encourage. Thirdly, there will be some schools which have an open access policy, so after the Catholic criteria, siblings would be a normal criterion anyway, but in the more difficult areas, it is simply a criterion of a distance measurement or something like that, so there is equal access.

 

Q674  Mr Pollard: I want to confess as well, Chairman. I am a practising Roman Catholic with seven children all educated in the Catholic faith. I think I am the only Member of Parliament with a Prayerful Productivity Medal.

Ms Stannard: You are keeping us going.

 

Q675  Mr Pollard: Absolutely right. I want to say to Oona Stannard that I read your memorandum and I want to ask a question on paragraph 3 "Distribution of Catholic Schools". It says "... 17-18% of the maintained secondary school stock and 82-83% of primary schools". I find that hard to believe.

Ms Stannard: That refers to the dioceses listed above where there are very high concentrations of Catholic populations traditionally: in Salford, Liverpool, Shrewsbury it is as high as is quoted there.

 

Q676  Mr Pollard: Heavens above. John, you told us you plan to expand your schools, yet we are told reliably that school rolls are falling. It would seem then that if you are expanding your schools and school rolls are falling some schools will have to shut down. Does that concern you at all?

Canon Hall: I do not myself believe that is likely to be the impact. Just remember that the figure for the moment for secondary schools is one in 20, so we are only expecting to move up marginally from that. That is a very small percentage. If we move up to seven per cent, that is not going to have a massive impact on the rest of the system.

Mr Pollard: In my own constituency we have Catholic masses now in the cathedral of St Albans and we have done that for many, many years and that seems to me to be a coming together of the two Christian faiths and we all started with the same stock anyway so it seems to me we are moving back together. The Anglican Church only has to apologise and they would be welcome back straightaway!

Jonathan Shaw: The Pope might not agree.

 

Q677  Mr Pollard: He told me to say that. There is a movement for coming together and there are good examples, certainly I know some in Scotland where schools share premises and share staff and all that and it seems to work very well. I wonder whether, particularly if you think of the Northern Ireland situation, it might be particularly helpful if faith schools came together. Do you both have a view on that?

Canon Hall: This does give me an opportunity not just to talk about the existing joint schools we have, of which there are ten with the Roman Catholic Church, mixed between secondary and primary, but also something like 52 joint with the Methodist Church around the country, all of them primary schools. We are looking for opportunities to work together and I am delighted that has presented itself in Liverpool where a new joint Church of England and Roman Catholic academy is planned in Liverpool.

 

Q678  Chairman: When you are planning them to be in specific places, is it where the communities need them or where you want to put them?

Canon Hall: I should love to be a very directive director on this, but in practice it has to bubble up locally. We have expressed an aspiration. We are encouraging dioceses, where they are not moving forward on this very strongly, to do so.

 

Q679  Chairman: Sometimes you have given up in hostile environments and just left the community and got out. I can think of Church of England schools where you have left the community, have you not?

Canon Hall: I hope that is not the case. We have had to close Church of England schools and that is undoubtedly the case. A large number of Church of England schools over the years, as schools have changed, have closed.

 

Q680  Chairman: So the Church of England has not had failing schools which they have walked away from.

Canon Hall: The Church of England has had some failing schools which we have stuck with and are transforming. I am very happy to say that there are particular cases, which I was thinking of earlier when you were talking of Archbishop Tennyson's School, of schools which have been in very challenging circumstances and which are now with inspiring new leadership doing extremely well.

 

Q681  Chairman: Sometimes witnesses do put a gloss on things. You had a wonderful joint school, Catholic/Anglican school in Oxford, did you not, which you have now walked away from? It is not all glowing, wonderful, onward partnership situations is it? There are some real difficulties.

Canon Hall: I would ask Oona to comment on that. It was not our wish that that school was closed. I ought just to say that we work very closely as far as the Church of England is concerned with other Christian denominations as well. In practice many of our schools give no preference to Church of England membership over other Christian denominations and that was something I wanted to say.

Ms Stannard: Whilst retaining our schools as very clearly identified Catholic schools, we nevertheless have many examples and wish to promote more and more of where our schools are working with other Christian schools and indeed schools where pupils of other faiths predominate and we would be very happy to supply the Committee with examples of that. Just off the top of my head, thinking about some work which happened in Bradford between one of our Catholic secondary schools and a Moslem girls' secondary school where through the actual pupils' initiatives with the teachers they wanted to come together and set up some joint activities and involve parents post 11 September and that work continued. A school not far from here in the East End of London where yes, we have a Catholic primary, but very close there is another primary which is nearly exclusively Moslem pupils and the two heads have worked hard to have one shared playtime a week. They set up a joint drama activity, they have moved to one another's school for collective worship, even though that is not a school of any identified faith. I could go on like that. We do seek to be working in partnership with many others. We are educating our young people for our pluralist society, but we believe that we can do both: prepare them for that and give them a very good grounding of an education in their own faith. That is what we have continued to seek to do.

 

Q682  Paul Holmes: According the religious trends survey of 2002-2003, 12.2 per cent of the adult population of England and Wales will say they are members of a church and 7.4 per cent will attend church regularly on a Sunday. In a typical community, in so far as such a thing exists, about 90 per cent of the population are not members of a church or churchgoers. In quite a number of communities the only local school is a faith school. For example, I was talking to a teacher recently who works in a small village in the Peak District in Derbyshire and the school is a very active Church of England school, very proactive in religious terms. If parents in that village did not want their child to go to an active faith school, they would have to take their kids away from all their friends in the village and bus them at their own expense to another village or town some miles away. Does that bother you at all or affect your planning on where you might put faith schools or how faith schools operate in communities?

Canon Hall: Where it hits most strongly is how Church of England schools operate within rural communities or other communities where they are the only local school. There is no doubt in my mind at all that they give absolute preference for children locally, where the parents want to send them there, that they are not in any sense ashamed of being Christian and being Church of England, that is what they are, they are strong in that, but they do not operate in a way which is seeking to ram it down the throats or proselytise, they are simply seeking to be a clear Christian presence serving the local community as it is. The Christian gospel, Christian values are certainly built strongly into the life of the school, but there is a clear recognition that not everyone in the life of the school is adherent to that, nor a requirement that they should be. Overwhelmingly that works extremely well.

 

Q683  Paul Holmes: But the parent who does not want to send their child to school - and I can certainly give you examples of schools where the head of a junior school says they cannot tolerate non-faith in their school. A parent in Sheffield has lodged an official complaint about that, so it does happen. The parent who does not want to send their child to that school has no choice unless they can afford personally to ship their child some miles away, away from all their friends, to another school, whereas two thirds of LEAs will pay for children to go many miles to a faith school, but they will not pay for children to go many miles as an alternative to a faith school. Does it not bother you at all that there is clearly an unfairness in the system there?

Canon Hall: I am conscious of it. I am conscious of two things. This may seem a slightly political answer, but it is a slightly political question. There are many people who suffer the opposite way round, Christians who would like to send their children to a Christian school, but cannot do so because there is not one, certainly beyond 11, near them. The other point about home to school transport is also a very interesting one. If it is only two thirds of LEAs, that is quite a reduction on the case for denominational transport as it was at one time. It seems to me that the argument could cut in the direction of providing effective transport for everyone who wants to follow a particular choice.

Ms Stannard: May I make a point about this home to school transport? It is the case that it goes back into historical agreements between LEAs and the churches in terms of where those schools were located and that that is what gave rise to agreements about home to school transport.

 

Q684  Valerie Davey: My background is somewhat different. I was an RE teacher but in a state school and I find it quite difficult to talk about faith schools because the implication is that the others are non-faith schools. I find this completely unacceptable, given the figures you have been quoting earlier about the number of people who in the privacy of their own home might say that they were of a faith and/or our concern over integration, whether in Northern Ireland or indeed in our own communities on the mainland. You spoke very positively about being open and inclusive. In terms of admissions, therefore, in terms of getting open and inclusive, would it not be better for the denominations and other faiths to be committing their time and effort to teachers and to getting teaching of RE, which is a compulsory subject, throughout all our schools? Would that not be a better way of evening out the problems and ensuring our commitment to all children for inclusion?

Canon Hall: It is an important thing but not necessarily a better thing; the two are not mutually exclusive. It seems to me that it is possible for us to attempt to do both/and. The Church of England is quite heavily involved in supporting RE teachers in various ways. Some of our trusts have given very generously towards both recruitment and training of RE teachers and it is an issue we have taken up very vigorously with government because we are very concerned at the lack of people coming through to teach RE. Sometimes, despite the important place RE has in schools and interestingly the increasingly popular place that RE has in schools, we are also aware of the fact that there is quite a bit of unsatisfactory teaching in RE and we want to do something about that. We can do both/and and we need to put our energies into both aspects of that.

 

Q685  Valerie Davey: What do you feel about that?

Ms Stannard: I too am a passionate supporter of community schools and the quality of education which goes on therein. Much of my professional life has been working in community schools and I was for many years an HMI. My concern is about the quality of education which any child is entitled to wherever they are educated. There are just times perhaps when I wonder if we do not lose sight of the agenda, which should be to make every school as good as possible rather, dare I say it, than suggesting that so many ills are always traceable back to admissions, which I would have to refute. What parents want is a first-class education in a good school for their children wherever they are. They want choice in that. That is what I want us all to be putting our backs into and ensuring that there is very good partnerships and that we are all learning from one another in those schools, be we teachers or children. RE, yes, very important in all schools, but I would suggest that what we are seeing in a church school which is distinctive goes far beyond the RE. For example, in a Catholic schools there will be a sacramental life to the school as well and that is appropriate in those circumstances, but very different in a community school.

 

Q686  Valerie Davey: If, as you heard from David Bell, there is something which is special and important about a Church school, what is it? You have answered in part. Could it not be transferred and should we not be encouraging that transference. It seems from my personal experience, and I am not a Catholic, I am a Methodist so it is not the sacramental element, it is the pastoral element, that it is the support. It does seem to me that could be established in all schools and that is what I would prefer to see.

Ms Stannard: There is much one can transfer and emulate and many religious values are also human values. I would also go back to the lead of my chairman, Archbishop Nichols, who speaks about values and the danger of suggesting that values are something you can bolt on or say if you could bottle these values you would pass them around. Values actually come, in the context in which I am working, from nurturing the roots of the plant and the whole plant. They are the fruits of all of that, they are not something which has been taken off a shelf. The whole of the institution of a Catholic school will be working to that and to do justice to your questions we would need to have a conference for many days.

 

Q687  Chairman: You will realise that we have been looking at a whole range of other issues in the secondary inquiry, it is just that admissions is this last sector.

Canon Hall: I think the bottling of the ethos was something David Blunkett said when he addressed Diocesan Directors of Education in 1998 and it has had wide currency. What seems to me to be clear is that there are very many people in education in all kinds of contexts who know that developing the whole person is important and that is what education is about. The particular difference in a Church school is that there is a gospel principle which gives rise to that value, which is about the sense of children being created and loved by God and having an eternal destiny which goes well beyond their work and everything else. The task of education is to enable them to fulfil their own God-given potential. If that is the object of the exercise, going so way beyond league tables or anything else, then it will have all kinds of impacts.

 

Q688  Valerie Davey: Surely you believe that for every child.

Canon Hall: Absolutely.

 

Q689  Mr Turner: Could I ask you each to tell me very briefly how your respective bodies represent - if that is the right word - the schools which carry the designations of those bodies, of your churches?

Ms Stannard: You will find that there is quite a difference structurally between the Church of England and the Catholic Church because for the Catholic Church the diocesan authorities are where local responsibility lies and it is the wishes of the Diocesan Bishop which are paramount. That said, the Catholic Education Service is charged with representing the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales on all matters to do with policy and education and the statutory interface. We carry that and liaise back very carefully with all our dioceses, but within that framework they are fairly autonomous. They will agree on codes and policies and so on through negotiations which we have.

Canon Hall: The situation with the Church of England is slightly different, but it is not dramatically different. The local trustees are often vicar and church wardens and sometimes they are the Diocesan Board of Education. They have a particular responsibility to their school as custodian trustees. Nevertheless, the diocese has a statutory role in relation to the school, both through the Diocesan Boards of Education measure of 1991, which succeeded earlier measures and is amended by Acts of Parliament and stands as part of the law of the land and in other ways. The power, the statutory responsibility does not lie with us at the centre. We are a strategic team wanting to support the diocese in their responsibilities. The measure does give Diocesan Boards of Education particular powers and duties and was amended by the 2002 Act to allow it to give guidance on admissions to schools in the diocese, guidance to which the schools have to have regard and that is in the direction of the inclusion.

 

Q690  Mr Turner: Thank you for that. A very brief supplementary to Ms Stannard. Am I right that you only represent diocesan schools, you do not represent non-diocesan Catholic schools?

Ms Stannard: By definition there is really no such thing because the local Ordinary, the Diocesan Bishop, is responsible for agreeing that a school has that Catholic designation. So all our Catholic schools are either independent within the independent sector, just under 200, or they are voluntary aided schools. We have no voluntary controlled schools. In the vast, vast majority of cases, those schools are under the umbrella of the diocese. For example, in the days when there were high numbers of religious orders, they would have been their own trustees but they tend to have handed those schools to the dioceses now. They would nearly all be diocesan schools.

 

Q691  Mr Turner: But you do not represent those which are not diocesan schools.

Ms Stannard: There are not really any.

 

Q692  Mr Turner: I am thinking of the London Oratory, for example.

Ms Stannard: I expect the London Oratory would be in a relationship with its Diocesan Education Board. Forgive me, there was a point I did wish to make relating to the responses to the last two questions. The Church of England has a right and indeed a role with its schools having to refer back to the diocese in terms of admissions, codes and so on. Somehow we do not have that same right in statute and it is quite a significant difference which we do not actually think is very helpful. It would be welcomed by us if our diocesan authorities were that same reference point on admissions policies as is the case with the Church of England.

 

Q693  Mr Turner: This applies again to both of you. You both have a function of making available Church schools to all pupils; in the Catholic schools it is a requirement of canon law, in a way it is a somewhat watered down version - and I do not mean that in a derogatory sense. Do you not feel that you have a duty to make such a school available as far as possible to every child who wants to go to one?

Canon Hall: As far as possible and that is why we are looking to expand secondary provision. It is certainly the case that some of our schools, secondary schools especially, are oversubscribed at the level of seven to one. That means that huge numbers of children are being turned away. I take David Bell's interesting point about the turn point at which a school becomes too large. We are not majoring on expanding popular and successful schools. If there is an opportunity for that and it seems right and the local community accepts it, then we are not against that. We are looking at filling in spaces where there simply is not the provision. Until quite recently there was virtually nothing between The Wash and the Scottish border apart from a couple of secondary schools and that is already changing.

Mr Whittington: I would add a reminder about our role as partners with LEAs. This was an issue you were talking about quite a lot with Mr Bell earlier on. The Diocesan Boards of Education and our Catholic colleagues are substantial players in partnership with LEAs to the good of all the schools - picking up your point on that. Of course we want, absolutely, the best possible opportunity for each and every youngster whatever school they go to and the fact that we have a range of schools of our own for which we have statutory responsibilities which involve us in a tier of involvement of which this is a part, means that we really do have the opportunity, in the name of the Gospel at times and at other times just in the ordinary everyday way which we handle things, to try to work as really positive partners with our LEAs to the best benefit of all the youngsters. That is really key to what we are about.

 

Q694  Chairman: Is the perception wrong then that Church schools, both Catholic and Anglican seem to be more associated with the leafy suburbs than the tough inner city areas? Is that a misconception?

Ms Stannard: It is.

Mr Whittington: Yes.

Canon Hall: It is. Certainly as far as our primary schools are concerned, they are everywhere: rural areas, inner urban areas above all, not so much in suburban areas because the bulk of the development was in the nineteenth century so we are thinner spread in the areas which developed in the twentieth century. As far as secondary is concerned, I have already indicated that we are patchily spread, but quite a large number of our secondary schools, not just the brand new ones, but the long-existing ones are serving very tough communities and not always finding it easy. That is why I wanted to make it clear earlier on that what we are talking about is not success but distinctiveness. We want excellence, doing the best possible for the pupils in the school and it gives me enormous encouragement to see some schools which have been in quite difficult circumstances being transformed by a new head.

 

Q695  Mr Turner: On the same theme, in your Board's recommendations to schools you say that the admissions policy should seek to ensure that the school is a distinctively Christian community - the admissions policy should do this. In the Catholic memorandum an example is given "First priority of admission will be given to committed and practising baptised Roman Catholic children". How can you tell whether a child is committed? How can you tell whether the admissions policy can ensure the school is distinctively Christian if you do not ask the children when you are admitting them how their faith works.

Canon Hall: This is really about interviews.

 

Q696  Mr Turner: Yes.

Ms Stannard: I have to be honest and say I am not frightfully keen on the word "committed". In a sense you can say you are committed to being in that kind of education by seeking a place and that shows you are committed. Practice in terms of worship is a much more objective thing to get hold of. Does that answer the question you were putting to me?

 

Q697  Mr Turner: Yes.

Canon Hall: Lord Dearing's advice to us is clear, that if there is a significant percentage, or at least a strong enough percentage of children of practising Christian families within the life of the school, as within the staff, that will have an impact on the school as a whole and that will enable it to fulfil its particular mission. There is a very clear commitment to it having other percentages, other people as well, but unless you have something which is clearly Christian about the place, other than just the head and one or two staff for example, then it is perhaps quite difficult to fulfil its purpose.

 

Q698  Mr Turner: So practice is evidence of commitment is what you are essentially saying.

Canon Hall: That is right.

 

Q699  Jeff Ennis: I should like to ask our two sets of witnesses what the trends are in terms of appeals against admission in Church of England schools and Catholic schools. Are they increasing, about the same?

Ms Stannard: I have to say that I have no evidence to suggest that they are increasing, but equally I cannot go beyond that. I do not have the data.

Ms Billington: We could come back to you with evidence, if that would be useful.

Canon Hall: I have not collected data on the part of Church of England schools in terms of admissions appeals. I know that there are some schools which have really alarmingly high numbers of admissions appeals and it is a very, very difficult thing for everyone to cope with. They are certainly not at the level of seven to one, as we were saying earlier. They take them seriously.

 

Q700  Jeff Ennis: I wondered whether you thought that by removing the power to interview some pupils that would impact on the number of appeals currently being taken through the system?

Ms Stannard: I am delighted that interviews have been removed and it was something we were keen on for quite a long time. Whether or not it has impact on appeals remains to be seen because the removal of interviews is not enacted yet.

 

Q701  Jeff Ennis: Why do you feel so strongly about that? Why are you saying that? You seem to be quite committed on that particular point.

Ms Stannard: It beholds us all to be as transparent as we can for the benefits of our communities and beyond. Everybody has a right to be able to see very clearly what the admissions base is. If you have interviews, they are by their very nature an exercise in personal discernment. You cannot interview someone in that sort of scenario and not be able to discern much information about social class, intellectual ability and probably a whole lot of lifestyle things as well. I would like to think that that information was always used honourably in all interviews. That said, the risk is far too high and I want them out of the way.

Canon Hall: I have no absolute evidence, but we did trawl around the dioceses and we came up with fewer than ten Church of England schools which did interview. It had always been our position that the Church of England schools did not need to interview and should not interview, yet, despite this very small number of schools interviewing, there was a general perception out there that interviews were going on and that they were being used for social prioritisation. That was not the case, but it seemed to us that it was very advantageous to let that go. We had pressed government that they should be banned and we were delighted to agree that they should be.

 

Q702  Paul Holmes: We have heard some comments about faith schools doing well and the Chief Inspector said that faith schools do well academically. There are two possible explanations put forward for this: one we have heard a little bit about which is the values. As we are all in a very confessional mode, I was a teacher for 22 years and I never taught in a faith school, but every school I ever worked in always taught values and valued the children. Other people suggest it might be something to do with admissions, either covert or overt, that faith schools might do a bit better academically. Government statistics and Ofsted statistics do show that faith schools on average take fewer children with special educational needs and fewer children who qualify for free school meals than national averages. For example, in 2001 when the Education Bill was going through Parliament, John Hall talked about St Christopher's school in Accrington which was a Church of England school with fairly good academic standards, 12 per cent of its pupils have special educational needs. Right next door to it, literally, in the same deprived urban area, is Moorhead High which has much lower GCSE standards. Sixty-nine point eight per cent of its children have special educational needs. Is it because one is a faith school and one is not that there is a difference in GCSE attainment, or because one in some way is selective and the other one is becoming a sink school and taking nearly 70 per cent of the children with special educational needs?

Canon Hall: The average story across the country, certainly according to the evidence Lord Dearing's review extracted from Ofsted a couple of years ago, was that if 17 per cent is the free school meals average across the country, for Church of England schools it is 15 per cent. That is not dramatically different. Our trend has been towards greater inclusion since then and we are continuing in that direction. I should be delighted to see the free school meals being entirely at parity.

Ms Stannard: I understand our free school meal levels are pretty much on national levels. Your SEN point is absolutely valid and it gives me concern in case there may be things we should be doing better. Since this became apparent to me, I have even had a conversation with David Bell and said this was something which would be really useful to look into. What is involved in this? Equally I have had some schools which have suggested to me that they go the extra mile before seeking statementing and they feel they do not need the recourse to statements and so on. I just do not know the validity of that. If I were an HMI now, I would be charging round drawing up an exercise to look into that because it is a very interesting point. Equally, there are other schools, and I was in a school not far from here this morning, very racially diverse pupil population, not many pupils on the SEN register - about the national average having said that. I asked the head why the levels were lower on average within the Catholic community. He replied that he had very stable staffing, very, very experienced staff. He said he was fortunate that many of his children had come in early on and he had worked with them through the whole of their school careers. Good on them. They are lucky. There will be other schools where you have great turbulence, many of our schools at present with high levels of refugees and asylum seekers. They are questions which merit further investigation.

 

Q703  Mr Chaytor: Could I ask about the link between faith schools and social segregation, with particular reference to the cities which experienced the riots two years ago? I was interested in the submission from the Catholic Education Service about Oldham. You quote the figures for the proportion of children who are non-Catholic in schools in Wolverhampton, Croydon, Tower Hamlets and in those boroughs the figure of non-Catholics is very high - 32 per cent, 42 per cent. In Oldham it is only seven per cent. You explain that by saying that Oldham is recognised as having generally more polarised communities. My question is: what is the relationship between cause and effect? Do you first of all get polarised communities and then get a smaller proportion of non-Catholic children in Catholic schools, or is it the other way round?

Ms Stannard: I am sorry, could you say that last bit again?

 

Q704  Mr Chaytor: Your written submission is defending the small proportion of non-Catholic children in the Catholic secondary schools in Oldham by saying that Oldham is generally recognised as having more polarised communities than the other towns you quote. My question is: does the pattern of admissions to the school reflect the polarised community, or is the fact that the school only has a very small proportion of non-Catholics a determining factor in creating the polarised community?

Ms Stannard: I would very much hope that if all schools in an area are nearly fully subscribed with their Catholic pupils that does not, nevertheless, isolate them from others and working with all those other schools around, be they Church of England, community or whatever. There is a sense in which Catholic schools will continue to be filled with Catholic pupils first wherever they are. Thereafter, as a community we must be seeking all ways possible to work inclusively with everybody else.

 

Q705  Mr Chaytor: Are you saying that there is no relationship at all with the nature of the secondary schools or the intake of the secondary schools and the level of segregation within the wider community in a given town or city?

Ms Stannard: That is what Cantle found, was it not? The Cantle report did not find statistics in terms of where those children were coming from and in which schools they were to back up that assertion.

Canon Hall: Ted Cantle, in his report on the riots, addressed directly the question whether faith schools had contributed to that polarisation and concluded that it was not that, that polarisation was in fact on the basis of where people lived in those towns.

 

Q706  Mr Chaytor: I am not taking the Cantle report as the definitive statement on this. I am testing it out. Are you content to rest with that conclusion?

Canon Hall: No, I am not content. What I want to say quite clearly is that schools in those circumstances need to develop inclusion in two ways and Oona has said this. One is in terms of admissions. As you will know, there are very popular Church of England secondary schools in many parts of the North West which are not heavily oversubscribed. Nevertheless, I know that some of them are looking carefully at how they can change their admissions policy so as to create more inclusion in terms of admissions. There is another thing which Ted Cantle also referred to, which is what Oona has referred to, which is creating inclusive educational links between schools. I know that our schools in Oldham, for example, have worked very hard at that and are working hard.

 

Q707  Mr Chaytor: May I switch to a specific question for the Church of England representatives and it relates to another town where riots took place and that is Bradford? In your written submission, there was a list of new Church of England schools which had opened, two of which were in Bradford. Four or five weeks ago there was interesting research from Bristol University which identified Bradford as the most segregated city in Britain and again raised the question of the relationship between the nature of the secondary schooling and the level of secondary education. Do you think that the opening of two new Church of England schools in Bradford will serve to widen or narrow the gap between communities in Bradford?

Canon Hall: Would it be a sufficient answer if I were to quote from a Moslem teacher in one of those schools, who said what a delight it was to be at a school where it was possible to name God and not be laughed at? Certainly one of the schools - and I think the other as well - is reflecting very much the local community it is set in. One is in a more white area and one is very mixed in its admissions practice and in its style but very clear about what its Church of England call is: to be a school which takes faith seriously. I believe that there are many of our schools which are able to bridge divides in a way which other schools perhaps cannot. I do not want to overclaim there, but if you take faith seriously as a fundamental principle in the life of the school, then you reach out to those other faiths and want to create a very positive link with them. It is dialogue in practice.

 

Q708  Mr Chaytor: Your new national guidance is very strong on inclusiveness and on opening up the schools to those of other faiths or of none. Are you monitoring the extent to which this is now happening, that is to say, do you have statistics?

Canon Hall: I have no statistics to quote.

 

Q709  Mr Chaytor: Is this the result of systematic monitoring of the pattern of admissions of both the existing Church of England schools and the new schools which have opened?

Canon Hall: We certainly have many stories to tell.

 

Q710  Mr Chaytor: That is not the same as a systematic collection of data.

Canon Hall: We have not done it ourselves. We are a small team at the centre. Dioceses themselves are responsible for that relationship and I can certainly see what I can find and write to you.

Ms Billington: Mr Chaytor drew attention to a particular point in our memorandum. It is not just a question of semantics, but he said that we had defended the seven per cent in Oldham. It is more that we contextualised it by saying that Oldham was generally recognised to have race and religion polarisation. We were not defending the seven per cent.

Mr Chaytor: I accept that.

Mr Pollard: It is not a question but a statement. My good friend Jeff Ennis asked about appeals. I just want to say that in my area the appeals for Catholic schools are going up, there is no question about that. In one school in particular you have to perform two small miracles now to get your children in.

 

Q711  Chairman: One of the interesting things is that the local priest can control entry into a Catholic school because it is not automatic that a child, even if a Catholic couple ask for baptism, will get it if they are not regular attenders at the church. Is that right?

Ms Stannard: It is typical that there will be preparation for baptism. It is not something where you simply phone up and ask for three o'clock next Sunday. There are preparation courses leading up to the baptism and that decision as to whether to proceed would then remain with the parish priest, yes.

Chairman: It has been a long session, it has been a very illuminating one for us. We are grateful for your attendance and the contributions you have made. If, when you are going away from here in a bus or taxi or whatever mode of transport, you think there is something this Committee should have heard that you did not articulate or a question we should have asked, we should be very grateful if you would contact us and if you would allow us to be in further contact by whatever method. Thank you.