MONDAY 10 MARCH 2003

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Members present:

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

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PROFESSOR JOHN BYNNER, Director, Centre for Longitudinal Studies Institute of Education, University of London, PROFESSOR SALLY TOMLINSON, Department of Educational Studies, University of Oxford, and DR EMMA SMITH, Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences, examined.

Chairman

I should like to welcome our witnesses to this session of the Education and Skills Committee. We very much appreciate Professor Bynner, Professor Tomlinson and Dr Smith spending the time to come before us. As I explained earlier, this is by way of our opening session in the second phase of our year= s inquiry into secondary education, 11-16. We have completed the first part of that inquiry on diversity and special schools, etc., and we are now looking at pupil achievement. In the context that we are the select committee that is the parliamentary watchdog on the DfES, we are always keen to look at the basis on which this Government often refers to wanting research-based policy. We like looking at that policy and seeing the research base that informs it. When we had a parallel inquiry in higher education last week, HEFCE said, almost à propos of nothing else except the research assessment exercise, that we were failing in this country to get enough departments in educational research up at 5 and 5* plus level. As all of you are from departments that are 5 or 5*, which are a minority, can you say why there is this dearth of high-quality research in education if what HEFCE suggests is to be believed? Professor Bynner, why is it?

(Professor Bynner) It is an interesting question. I think professional fields generally, which education is, tend to attract people who are pursuing a profession - teaching or whatever, at whatever level - and they would be the obvious recruits to educational research; and therefore I think there is a smaller proportion that want to take that career route. That is the only explanation that immediately comes to mind.

(Professor Bynner) Dr Smith, you have been in the profession less time than your two colleagues; what do you think?

(Dr Smith) Until April I was a secondary school teacher. I guess my movement into HE has been fairly typical for educational researchers. I did my PhD while I was teaching. I was interested in educational research and fancied doing something different, rather than standing in front of the classroom. I agree with Professor Bynner that people who move into HE tend to have that background of teaching in schools and maybe enter academia later in their careers. I know that part of the work we are doing at Cardiff with the research and capacity-building network - thinking of building a research capacity in education specifically for educational research - there certainly seems to be agreement that we need to move forward, maybe like a healthcare model of combining different approaches to doing educational research, a quantitative and qualitative approach, with the use of more quantitative techniques such as large randomised control trials and that sort of research. I guess we will have to see what happens as part of the capacity-building.

(Professor Tomlinson) I have been in the RAE since they first began in 1985, when I wrote the first submission for Lancaster University, when I was there. Subsequently, I seem to have either written or been involved with each of the exercises. I was on the Education Research Panel in 1992 and 1996, which involved reading submissions from all 104 education departments in the country. One thing that is very noticeable is that in universities in particular, which is where the majority of teacher education goes on, the education has traditionally been regarded as rather low status. At Oxford, for instance, they did not even have a professor of education until 1989, because it was regarded as second-class; and even now at Oxford some people will look down their noses a bit at education. It was also harder to get research money. To do large-scale longitudinal work or quantitative work, you need money; and it is reasonably difficult in education; you have to write quite a lot of proposals and so on before you get the money. There is the status of education departments; getting the money; and then, as my colleagues here say, people who go into education departments have usually been promoted or appointed because like Emma here, they are good at teaching and so on. Being good at teaching, having your own PhD, having research experience, you are usually older then and not in the same position as, say, younger scientists, who can start a career in research right from being 25 or 26. I suppose I ought to put in a plea here for rather negative reports that have been written about educational research because it is not as bad as some of the critics have made out. With younger people there is now some excellent educational research going on. It is nice to know that policy in the future is going to be based on research.

Let us now get down to the main business. Some members of this Committee were very impressed at one stage with the PESA study and report. We went to OECD to discuss that with them in Paris. There seemed to be a clear message out of that; that the UK had done rather well, but the gaps between the achieving two-thirds and the lower achieving one-third was much greater than many of our competitors, and that was a cause for concern. However, some of the research that we have been sent, partly from you, almost puts a question mark over that OECD research, in the sense that I thought you were saying that from some of your work you cannot rely on that kind of information. Is that true?

(Professor Bynner) On the PESA work?

Yes.

(Professor Bynner) It is a cross-sectional survey, and there are always question marks about drawing very strong conclusions about differences on that basis. There is a move in fact to develop a new survey that would take into account a lot of these questions about different meanings, different sampling approaches, which are not fully standardised across PESA; but, also, more importantly, making the work longitudinal so you can track the progress of pupils in these different systems, which is a far more effective way of judging their effectiveness.

I know of your great experience in tracking one cohort over thirty years.

(Professor Bynner) Two actually; and we have recently produced a piece of work comparing three - people born in 1946, 1958 and 1970. The two cohort studies that I have done a lot of work on are the 1958 and 1970 cohorts. The 1970 cohort people are now in their thirties. In relation to that second question about social gradients in education, there is quite a difference. If you look at leaving school at 16, for example, which is one first key indicator of achievement or whatever - moving out of the system, often with minimum qualifications - that the gradient was much larger in the earlier born cohorts - substantially more, and particularly for boys. That is across the classes. Now there is a very strong class gradient, but nothing like as strong as it was for the earlier born cohorts. In the case of qualifications, the level ultimately achieved, going right up to degree level, down to no qualifications at all, there has been no shift at all across the classes as far as educational achievement is concerned, suggesting that the basic social gradient, for whatever reason in this country, has remained remarkably stable. We might wish to speculate why that is, but that is certainly what we found from our research.

What light does that reflect on the recently commissioned research from the London School of Economics by the Sutton Trust, which seemed to suggest that social mobility in this country had gone into reverse rather than extenuated?

(Professor Bynner) Our evidence comparing all three cohorts suggest there has not really been any change in relative mobility. The occupational structure has changed, in the sense that there are far fewer jobs at the bottom end of the occupational scale than there used to be; there are far more people in professional and managerial positions, intermediate positions; there has been a movement into white-collar work. But if you look at relative mobility and how the jobs of sons compare with the jobs of fathers, you cannot demonstrate any mobility at all across these two cohorts. I would not say it has gone into reverse; it just has not improved; so we have as unequal a society as we ever had; and you do not get over it through the rise in education, substantial rise in education opportunity and also in achievement that overall we have seen.

(Professor Bynner) You are saying that the national treasure that we have been putting into education, whether it be primary and early education or higher education has had no effect on the class tracks in this country; it remains the same.

(Professor Bynner) It has raised the level; the standards have gone up hugely. The benefit in terms of human capital for this country is considerable. We are talking about the variation around that mean level of achievement, having rocketed up, reflecting the changes in the labour market of course - but then the demand for qualifications in all industrial societies has gone up substantially. What we have not seen any shift in is the variation around that mean level of achievement, which is the same as it always has been. In this country, the reasons may lie quite deeply, in terms of what people describe as cultural aspirations or limited aspirations - poverty of aspirations, which seems to still persist at the bottom end of the social scale.

Is that similar to other countries, or different?

(Professor Bynner) It is similar to other countries. All countries have social gradients, but they are far less in some than in others. The Nordic countries are particularly successful in having a very homogeneous education system which gives entry to vocational and professional occupations; but the class levels in those societies are very much smaller than ours. Comparable to ours is Germany, you might say, which is also very a highly stratified society.

(Dr Smith) To return to the PESA analysis, we did some work looking at segregation - looking at the results of how students are distributed amongst schools. It is part of the European project, where we compared every EU country. We found, looking at the poorest, children and students who fall into the poorest 10 per cent, and how they are distributed throughout schools, the system in Britain is at least as equitable as those in other European countries. Countries where they select at an earlier age, for example Germany, in the Netherlands and to some extent in France, the students are far less evenly distributed throughout the schools in regard to poverty and similarly in regard to achievement. The schools in this country were far more homogeneous. They were far less segregated and it was far more equitable. Countries that came out better were the Scandinavian countries. Finland is held up as being a success through PESA. We also looked at the distribution of schools on the PESA assessment as regards to indicators of poverty. Although there was quite a large distribution for the schools in the UK, nevertheless the distribution was skewed towards the top end. Our poorest 10 per cent, ranking the distribution between the poorest 10 per cent and the richest 90 per cent as far as they performed at school on the reading tests - the students in the UK were ranked third or fourth highest of all the EU countries. So the performance of our poorer children was at least as good as the performance of students in Finland. There are a lot of positive things to be found in the PESA study, and the implication of how fair schools are in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which are the three countries included in that study. Certainly, from work we have looked at with low achievement and under-achievement, and distinguishing between the two, the children from the poorest homes certainly did appear to be the low achieving students. That does not necessarily mean that they were the under-achieving students. By looking at the distinction between under-achievement and low achievement, we had very different populations of students, and I think there are messages to be drawn from that, if you are looking at some kind of crisis account of the state of our schools. Maybe in regard to under-achievement, things are not as bad as we are sometimes led to believe.

Professor Tomlinson, can you tease out this low achievement and under-achievement argument for us?

(Professor Tomlinson) Just to comment on the PESA study, there was a headline in the paper saying A shock, horror; we are doing quite well@ - because we were actually eighth in maths and eighth in science; so perhaps doom and gloom is not all that is on the agenda. The thing that the PESA study did tease out was that we have this famous long tail of low achievement - we have high achievers and a tail of young people who are not achieving well. The major thing to come out of the PESA study is that the high achievement goes along with non-selective systems in Finland, South Korea - not North Korea - Canada, and Scotland. There are a lot of lessons that we have not learned from the Scots. These are places where high achievement goes along with non-selection and more equity, whereas selective systems tend to have this tail of low achievers, which is what we have here.

Is that because selection reinforces a class structure?

(Professor Tomlinson) Yes. I am not the first to say this - from Turney onwards - the curse of the education system has been our mania with selection. When we know that there are so many advantages to non-selection, why we persist with anxieties over selection ... We may be pushing at an open door here, just to stick on selection - which you may want to talk about later. There is sufficient research indicating now that even the higher achievers in the selective system, i.e., the remaining grammar school system, may not be doing well for them. Certainly, for your average and less average children, research now is demonstrating that you can do just as well in comprehensive schools. We particularly focus on Kent here and David Jesson= s research that he did for Stephen Layard, which demonstrated that even in statistically comparable local education authorities, children who were achieving the A/B levels of GCSE A-C - there were more of those in the comprehensive systems achieving that than in the selective systems. A recent Kent Ofsted report that was done in January demonstrated again that the schools that had the tail of under-achievers were, unsurprisingly, the secondary modern schools, and that these were schools that were in special measures - were likely to be secondary modern schools. We seem to be amassing sufficient research now to demonstrate that overt selection has just been the curse of the twentieth century, and why we are going into the twenty-first century still worrying about this is very surprising. We do have this issue to worry about, which is the young people who are both under-achievers within our system and low achievers. This is quite interesting work that Stephen and Emma are doing, to differentiate between these groups of children. You can find a whole variety of explanations for children that are under-achieving - their potential is there and they should be achieving better; whereas the children who are lower achievers, tend to be children on free school meals - so we are talking about poverty here, which is very important - children who are poor - and on free school meals is the measure of that. Children who have special educational needs tend to be in that group too. We have a whole variety of explanations that we can offer for both under-achievers and low achievers. It is nice that we are beginning now to do some research into trying to tease these factors out. On the other hand, I have to come down to this relatively simplistic model that many people still hold about selective and non-selective education systems, which is that somehow if you are selective, you are going to do the best for all your children. We simply know from research now that you are not. Non-selective education systems are much more likely to be doing their best for all children.

Mr Turner

Is under-achievement merely a polite word for low achievement?

(Dr Smith) I think not. If you look at under-achievement, you have all sorts of problems. What is the achievement relative to what is under-achievement? If we operationalise what we mean by under-achievement and try to design a model with which we can best predict how somebody will perform in school, we can use all the factors that we think can impact on an individual= s performance in school, and then, if they do not do as well as expected, they are under-achieving. If we go along with that idea - okay, we agree that that is a reasonable definition of under-achievement. That means you can have very able children who under-achieve and you can have less able children that under-achieve; so children who under-achieve can come from across the ability range. Work we have done was a very in-depth study on a relatively small sample of children - over 2,000 children - and we got as many of the factors as we could get our hands on that could contribute to performance in school. We looked at prior attainment, family background, motivation and so on. We looked at what is so special about students who do not do as well as expected, or the under-achievers on this particular model. Is there a clearly-defined group of students who are under-achieving in school? The answer was that they were not. The students that were under-achieving came from across the ability range. They were students who should perhaps have got three level 7s at Key Stage 3 but had two level 6s and a level 7 and did not quite get their three level 7s; or they were students who remained on level 4s from Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 and had not moved up a level across the key stages. But there was nothing special about them. There were working-class boys who were under-achieving, and also those who were over-achieving; so there was nothing special about this under-achieving group of students. The analogy we used was - you start off with this major topic of under-achievement; it is like having a handful of sand, and you try and understand what under-achievement actually means; and really you are left with very little. Students do under-achieve, but there was nothing special about them. If you contrasted with those that were low achieving, those children that did less well in school - as Sally says, the children who had free school meals - did less well in examinations. They attended school less regularly, and so on. I think that there is a difference between under-achievement and low achievement.

Professor Tomlinson, your paper talks about under-achievement by ethnic minority pupils, which, judging by what Dr Smith has said, does not exist.

(Professor Tomlinson) We did not do sufficient research and we do not know enough about the education of ethnic minority students over the last thirty or forty years, but certainly the concept of under-achievement was applied right from the 1960s to minority students because their parents had ambitions for them to achieve; in some cases, when verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning tests were given, the children scored higher than their school achievements - and I am going back to the 1960s now. So people began to use this concept of under-achievement, and I think it was used very loosely. Quite rightly, it was a concept that was criticised - what do we mean by this concept of under-achievement? That is why it is nice that Emma and Stephen are trying to tease out the factors that refer to this. The research I have been involved in and the research that I know of would indicate that many minority pupils, and particularly here African-Caribbean pupils, are definitely under-achieving; and school processes and a whole variety of other processes actually held them back.

(Professor Bynner) I have recently done research on both things, starting off disadvantaged and then moving up the educational scale across time, and the comparable thing, which is staying level and moving down. I have looked at the period from 42 months to the age of 5 in cognitive skills type development, and from age 5 to age 10 in terms of reading and numeracy. There is evidence of movement down: about 20 per cent of pupils from the top 20 per cent to the bottom 50 per cent over those time periods. I find that there is not a huge difference. Those who escape from disadvantage or move up are rather similar in being the opposite to those who move down. There is a class effect in our research, which is tied to large families, various kinds of disadvantage, living in council rented accommodation, which does predict this movement downwards - plus signs of poor performance at the earlier stage. You have got a double disadvantage - low ability in terms of that sort of language; but also material circumstances; and together they predict more than chance a movement down the scale.

I must say that I feel rather confused by those answers. Perhaps Dr Smith could respond to the other two because they both seem to be asserting that under-achievement exists in identifiable groups, not just, as I suspect you are saying, at random.

(Dr Smith) Would this not be low achievement?

That is what I was wondering.

(Professor Bynner) It depends how you operationalise or define the term. If you define it as a longitudinal process - the paper I gave to QCA was called Under-Achievement as a Developmental Process, looking across time and how people are moving through the educational system, some seeming to benefit from it and some seeming not to do so, or moving down through it. That is how I defined it. But I think your definition was a little different.

(Dr Smith) We wanted to look at all the factors that would influence how somebody would perform in an examination and take social class or family background into account. That accounts for so many of the variants in how somebody would perform in an exam. Realistically, what can schools do about that? Schools have to respond to the nature of their intake. The perspective we came from was really from the schools= perspective - what can schools do with the children they have in secondary schools at year 7? Taking that as read, and taking the children in year 7 and all the information we know about them, and then seeing from then on whether they would under-achieve - I agree with what Professor Bynner is saying about the idea of low achievement; but as distinct from under-achievement, I think that they are two concepts we need to separate out and understand. The population of under-achieving students is not necessarily the same as the population of low achieving students.

(Professor Tomlinson) The research I did in the seventies, eighties and into the nineties was more focussed on the school. You take children as individuals or groups of children, and then ask what the school is doing for these children. If you can demonstrate that the children should be capable of achieving whatever measure of achievement you are taking, and then you look at the school processes and find that because of those processes this cannot happen, you have to start asking some serious questions. Right from the 1960s we did have sufficient evidence to show that teachers treated children differentially in schools, and had what became termed A low expectations@ of different groups of children. This particularly applied to the African-Caribbean children. From my research and experience in schools, I think that low expectations did contribute to children not achieving as well as they ought to have done. In the 1980s from research that David Smith and I did, you could demonstrate that children of the same measured level of ability - if they were particular groups, they were not entered in 1986 for A O@ Level - it was the last year of A O@ Level/CSE - and they would be entered for CSE rather than for A O@ Level, even if they were the same measured ability. Then you had interesting things like girls, who were not supposed to be achieving in computing and science subjects, actually being asked to give up their places to boys. If you are not entered for examinations or allowed to be taught courses, it is very hard to demonstrate your achievement. David Gillborn= s recent research also demonstrates that even now, in the late 1990s and present-day, some children are not entered into the higher tiers of GCSE; and, therefore, it is impossible for them to achieve the higher levels of GCSE. As long as we have got school processes like this, we have got a problem.

That means that they cannot achieve a particular examination result; it does not mean that they cannot achieve the standard - if we can agree what is meant by that. In the paper by Professor Gorard and Dr Smith, they say that there is no clear evidence at all of the schools having a systematic effect on attainment of their students. Professor Tomlinson clearly thinks differently - if only a negative one. How do you respond to that?

(Professor Bynner) I think the work of David Gillborn, my colleague at the Institute has certainly really forced us to examine what Sally Tomlinson has said there; that the way students are allocated at comparable ability levels to different kinds of courses can be based on social reasons, and ethnicity is one of the clear factors in determining what a kid is considered capable of achieving, even though that can counteract evidence to the contrary when they are younger at age 11.

(Professor Tomlinson) We are talking about two different things. The Gorard & Smith research did not actually look at allocation to courses.

(Dr Smith) It is interesting if you look at it. On the one hand, if children from poorer homes are doing less well in school, and possibly the way that teachers assign students to examination classes has an impact on that - as a teacher I did not necessarily know who the poor children were that I taught. I knew who the boys were and who the children from ethnic minority backgrounds were, but I would not have known who the poor children were, so I am not sure how we can reconcile that with children doing less well from poorer homes.

I confess that I was expecting something a bit more profound than A they end up in the wrong classes@ .

(Professor Tomlinson) This is what research is all about. You can also say that things have moved on somewhat, and also in different areas. The Welsh school system is different than the English and Scottish systems. The areas where ethnic minorities, particularly African-Caribbean children are concentrated - 50 per cent in the London areas and in other areas - so the different groups have different levels of achievement and under-achievement, and different explanations can be offered. There is no one simple explanation. There are either under-achieving children who are capable and we do not get them there because of a whole variety of things; and there are also children who may be genuinely rather less able and low achievers.

Chairman

I am conscious that we are getting very few questions answered so far. They are very good answers, but we have to speed up the process, or there will be a lot of sulking going on in the rest of the Committee.

(Professor Bynner) To broaden the thing a little beyond teachers, I think there is a way of looking at this, particularly pre-school and early primary - what amounts to vicious and virtuous circles. I think you get a set of factors that move families and school apart, which means that the parents start off with very high hopes in education, but very often there is a problem in meeting teacher expectations, particularly in large primary classes. Therefore, they are seen as being not really working in the grain of educational achievement. That is a mental process that can get worse. It happens even before they arrive at school, as you can see from the basic skills needed to succeed in reading.

The Government should put its money into Sure Start, Professor Bynner.

(Professor Bynner) Absolutely. Sure Start is an enormously important initiative for that reason. We have got to keep teachers and families together and not see them separating apart.

Mr Chaytor

Pursing the point about low achievement and under-achievement, is it fair to say that low achievement is a phenomenon that can be determined by the social group to which you belong, but under-achievement is entirely an individual phenomenon?

(Dr Smith) That is the conclusion we came to, yes.

Would all three of you agree on that?

(Professor Tomlinson) No.

(Professor Bynner) No.

We have different views. One is that under-achievement is entirely individual and almost random; and a view that certain groups, either the lowest socio-economic groups or ethnic minority groups, systematically under-achieve - and membership of those two groups is the determining factor as to whether they under-achieve. Can I ask about the longitudinal study then, because it is a long time since 1946. What I do not understand is how we can be sure, over that long timescale, that in terms of achievements we are comparing like with like. Are you saying, Professor Bynner, that we are absolutely sure that the qualifications that those born in 1946 obtained can be compared exactly with the equivalent qualifications of those born in 1970? Then there is the follow-up question. In terms of the social structure, you are saying there has been no educational mobility during that period. Did we use the same descriptions of social groups for 1946 school-leavers as we do now - the As, Bs, C1s and C2s? Secondly, surely it would only work if there were the same proportion of the population in each of those social groups?

(Professor Bynner) On the business of whether educational attainment is comparable across cohorts separated by 24 years in the years of their birth, I think there is. You are basically looking at rank orders on an achievement scale, and whatever the examinations are, they can give you that rank order by and large. Of course, there are differences in the qualifications and there has been a huge change in the number of people staying on at school at 16. All those issues certainly come into it. I think you can make comparisons. Certainly, in the 1958 and 1970 cohorts, one does see the shifts I was describing. There is a remarkably similar social gradient in qualification levels between those two cohorts. In relation to the social mobility issue, you are absolutely right that the occupational structure has changed enormously; there are far fewer unskilled jobs than there used to be, with more people in white-collar and professional occupations. But when you look at movement between the generations - which social mobility is about - between relative positions - again, rank orders in those structures - you find that the relative movement up and down the rank order of achievement is much the same across those two cohorts. So there is not real evidence, and the best of it comes from Oxford, from John Goldthorpe and Richard Breen, that there has been a shift. This is true of most countries. There is very little evidence of countries achieving social mobility, set against the changing nature of the social and occupational world.

In terms of the response to that, is your conclusion that everybody just simply gives up and does not do anything; or do you think there are strategies that government could adopt to change that so that there was more mobility and movement between C

(Professor Bynner) Mobility is a very challenging issue, and it raises all sorts of questions to do with entry into higher education and the rest of it. I think the country should concentrate on what Sweden did, on the business of the social gradient. It can be a very steep one, so tiny proportions at the bottom end do not get anywhere educationally, and very large proportions of those at the top do very, very well and they all get higher education and all the works. In Sweden you see very much less of that - a much reduced gradient. It is due to the reasons that Sally mentioned. We know this from thirty or forty years ago. Torsten Husén did experiments to see the effects of ending selection in Swedish schools, compared with keeping them as they were. His classic experiment in Stockholm found that in fact those where the non-selective system operated did better. It is that commitment to an unselective secondary education that has achieved in the Nordic countries this remarkably better level playing-field - a real equal opportunities structure. There will always be variation between individuals, but you do not want to see it so heavily based in class. It used to be based in gender and now it is not. The gender thing has been very much more achieved, in that there is not this huge variation between the achievements of the boys and girls, but there is still across the social classes.

Professor Tomlinson, can you separate out the impact of belonging to an ethnic minority and the impact of being in social group D or E? Is it possible to disaggregate those two attributes?

(Professor Tomlinson) That has been the focus of quite a lot of recent research. I will just say that for a lot of my career I wondered why the highest achievers in the country were always white male, upper or middle-class men. Now, things are changing very slowly. There are obviously wider influences in society than just what is happening within groups or within schools. We seem to have a pattern of the usual OMS social class measures, and ethnicity is interacting in quite complex ways, and we are not quite sure how. We do know that right from the start, various minority groups entered into our education system in the 1960s from different class positions anyway. Caribbean children entered, and their parents had had no secondary education because there was not any in the Caribbean until 1955. From India, some people entered whose parents had been under the British Raj and had reasonably high educational qualifications. Some came from rural Pakistan, where the parents had had no education dat all. So they came in to our system in different class positions. Once within the system, they either removed or moved up; so there has been mobility in some ethnic minority groups, particularly Hindu and Sikh grous, although there are some Gujarati Muslims. There is also a small number of Chinese students who are quoted as doing better within the education system, which they are in terms of our public examinations. In recent PhD studies that I have had the privilege to read, class seems to come out more strongly than ethnicity. Mind you, that also happened in the research that I have carried out myself: class emerged as a stronger factor in attainment than ethnicity. This may be for all the reasons we are familiar with: once you achieve a particular level of material economic well-being, you have cultural capital, more cultural attributes. I am not going to say that you have more motivation or desire for your children to achieve because I have certainly never found that any group has lacked this desire for their children to achieve; but some parents are much able to do this. If you are moving to a more middle-class position, you are better able to do this. We can demonstrate through research now that class does have a larger influence on attainment.

Chairman

Is class too blunt an instrument? In my own experience, under-achievers in my part of the world are those that tend to come from a background where there is no culture of educational background and support. If you look at our own regional diversity, there are differences between aspirations and ambition for education for children in different parts of the United Kingdom. My view seems to be backed up by what you are saying: it is the culture of educational background, not just class. Many of my Pakistani constituents come from a very rural area of Pakistan, with no deep tradition of education - but so do a lot of my white working-class constituents come from backgrounds where there is very little tradition of education. Each of the under-achieving groups seem to have that in common - not just their class position but the background of the culture. Is that something that you researchers measure, or is that impossible to measure?

(Professor Tomlinson) In Scotland, the assumption was that whatever your caste position, you could get on through education. Motivation was very strong because education was valued. I do think that it is very difficult to measure here, and I have certainly found no way of measuring it. But the way in which education has not been regarded as terribly valuable until quite recently, over the past 20-25 years, it gradually became more commonly accepted that you had to have education and qualifications in order to get on. Working-class people began to see this. This deference - A education is not for the likes of us@ began to disappear. There is much more awareness now of the need for education. I have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of parents from ethnic minority groups but I have not met one yet who was not passionately interested in their children= s education. A major reason for migration, after economic migration was that their children should do better in school than they did. Education was seen as very important.

My point is that you can be passionate and you can walk into the house and see how many books there are. That is sometimes a better assessment of the culture, is it not? Some of your fellow researchers said in evidence to this Committee that outcomes of schooling can be 80 per cent based on the pupils= experience outside of school, and 20 per cent of what happens within the school. If that is true, that reinforces the cultural argument, does it not?

(Professor Tomlinson) That is the argument that children do spend a lot more time outside school than they do inside school and C

No, this is saying something different. It is saying that the outcomes of education are more about children= s experience outside the classroom; in other words, the support their families give them, than what happens in the school.

(Professor Tomlinson) I think you are talking about interaction here.

(Professor Bynner) You can measure these things. If you look at the key factors that predict achievement and its counterpart, under-achievement, it is to do with the educational level of families. These things are all related to class in one way or another. The occupational structure is where the education you have got puts you, by and large. But the other aspects of what I would call poverty of circumstances, overcrowded conditions - poverty, as a problem that dominates life - and non-working families show this factor in educational achievement, or lack of it, quite a bit; and the other is poverty of aspiration and lack of interest or support. We find that factor coming up continually. It is not knocked out by something else; it is not confounded by anything else. These are teacher judgments - that with parents who are not really working with the school or that much interested in the child= s interest, it will typically show up in the child= s poor performance later on. I think you can measure it to that extent.

(Professor Tomlinson) People say A there are no books in the home@ - but now it is more important whether there is a home computer because they give children an enormous edge. There is a lot of profit to be made now to selling home computers, and so people who can afford it get them. There is also home tutoring by people who can afford to tutor their children. I know quite a lot of people from minority groups, particularly Indian groups, who spend an awful lot on home tutoring. Then there are the study guides to the text, the revision guides. They cost an awful lot of money, but if you can afford to buy them, then money still does count in building up your cultural capital as well.

(Dr Smith) In our study, the low-achievers were less involved in their education; they were less likely to attend parents= evening or ask them about their schooling; but the children were not noticeably less negative in how they enjoyed school. There was no difference in their attitude towards school: they were positive. I think they want to do well in school but they do not always know how to go about doing it, and they did not have that support at school.

Chairman: Let us go on to ethnic minority achievement.

Mr Pollard

How successful has Government policy been in raising ethnic minority achievement? (Professor Tomlinson) Yes, I must pass a value judgment here.

Please do.

(Professor Tomlinson) Yes. I think we have been very slow, in terms of Government policy and that is reflecting society as a whole, in actually being able to incorporate ethnic minority children within a system that was, in fact, designed for a white majority, if you like. Policies began in the 1960s and there were some quite positive policies, particularly coming from HM Halliday(?) in terms of English as a second language and so on. From the 1970s there was a bottom-up movement from teachers when they recognised that the education system had to change, and it was teacher pressure that actually brought about the Rampton Committee from 1979, which even when there was a change of government continued. Then that was published as the Swann Committee, which was a kind of highlight, in a sense, of government interest in the education of minorities. I do think that during the 1980s there was a falling-off of policy interest and there was also quite a lot of negative propaganda - if I can put it like that - against education, always blaming minorities for various aspects of incorporating the system. Then there was a lot of overt negative stuff. I have to tell you when the national curriculum 1988 first came in, Kenneth Baker wrote a letter to Duncan Graham - who was the first chair of the MCC - saying: A You will take account of the fact that there are, I think, minorities within the system and the government actually wishes to amend this,@ and so on, A you will do so.@ So Duncan set up a committee - when in doubt set up a committee - there were nine of us and six of us were members of minority groups, and none of us were looney lefties, we were all reasonably sensible people. We sat for a year and we looked at ways in which we could get a curriculum for all - because the Swann Committee had called it, the changed curriculum - and how we could get this into every national curriculum subject. We gave a lot of attention to this and we produced this report and the report was never published. I will not tell you the name of the minister that actually said: A We do not want this stuff in the national curriculum,@ or words to that effect, but I was told later who it was. There was a definite negative - focus, is the word - A We do not actually want it, it is not important.@ There have actually been other instances of this happening where deliberate focuses on multi-culturalism, I will call it, or multi-cultural anti-racist education, as we used to call it, trying to get this into the national curriculum and actually face up to the fact that the education system had to change to incorporate different groups. I do not think Government policy has really addressed this yet. I think there is still a great deal of nervousness of doing this and, particularly I have to say after the events of 2001, a real backing-off of serious commitment to it.

Chairman

Does anybody else want to contribute to that question?

(Dr Smith) Very briefly. I think in the research that we have looked at there does not seem to be the availability of data on the forms of ethnic minority pupils as there are for some of the boys and girls. You can track a performance and a differential attainment of boys and girls over 25 years and you can consider the gender gap. It does not seem as easy to do that with the achievement of students from ethnic minority backgrounds. Also, the problems in how you categorise and how you define ethnicity. There are lots of problems involved in research in that particular group, and also I think disagreements in how you measure differential attainment over time in a proportionate study. I know that Stephen Gorard has written quite a lot on this, the edge of politicians= error. If you look at a proportionate analysis of the performance of certain children from ethnic minority backgrounds, their improvement has increased at a rate that is comparable to that of children from white backgrounds. So I think the answer to what has Government policy done to improve the achievement, it has improved the achievement of all students including those from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Chairman: Right. We ultimately need rapid fire questions because there might be a division.

Mr Pollard

In my local authority area, it is the Bangladeshi children who achieve lesser opportunities on SATs. In fact, I was staggered when I saw that the Pakistanis were lower, that is not the case at all. Is it the Bangladeshi girls are looking at the Bangladeshis generally, because they definitely achieve much better than the Bangladeshi boys, they are lavisher than their white counterparts in many areas. How does that feature? Does that bring on the Bangladeshis?

(Professor Tomlinson) Yes. There is a lady called Zubida Haque, who actually works in DfES, and she did an excellent PhD - it was a quantitative study - looking at Bangladeshis across the country. Certainly, in the 1980s no Bangladeshi children were doing particularly well, partly because they were recent arrivals and were less likely to speak English. There were interesting things, like Tower Hamlets did not have enough school places for them, which was something of a scandal. By the 1990s the local authorities had started to take more interest, particularly in areas like Tower Hamlets and Bedford. The English was much better and aspirations had gone up a whole lot more, particularly for girls, and so the girls really did begin to achieve. A good example was Mulberry School in an area of Tower Hamlets - which I am sure you do know - which suddenly zoomed up because of all these various factors and really focusing on this, which is a good example for if you want to change things, then you go in recognising that there is no one explanation, that there are a whole variety of explanations, and it can happen when you focus on raising achievement in particular.

Chairman: Val Davey wants to come in on this.

Valerie Davey: Specifically amongst minority ethnic groups, the second language is the issue. I have a pet theory that if you can speak two languages, you have more brain cells than the rest of us. So they should have an advantage and it seems to me that we have not perhaps activated this. What are we doing about language development, not just English, but mother tongue development amongst minority ethnic groups?

Chairman

Can we hear from Professor Bynner first on this?

(Professor Bynner) I do not have any evidence on this, I am afraid. I am very sympathetic to the point being made. Actually, a lot of debate went into teaching in the first language in schools, and I think the evidence is in favour of that and has a huge motivating value. I think, again, in Scandinavia they have done work along these lines. That is all I know.

How does this work?

(Professor Bynner) You actually recognise the language spoken at home, and do, when there are sufficient numbers, teach in that language sessions even within the mainstream school, and that has beneficial effects for the ethnic minorities.

That certainly was not our experience in Denmark, Professor Bynner. What we saw in Denmark was it was absolutely taboo to talk about ethnic minority cultures in teaching. They have even little Hans Christian Andersen centres which absolutely are to train children to be little Danes and to the total exclusion of their original culture.

(Professor Bynner) Yes, but there was this countervailing argument, maybe that is the other side of the argument. Certainly these were discussions I heard relating to Swedish education, whether or not that homogenising of everything and everybody should be made simpler, because these cultures are at a national adult level very homogenised.

The Committee suspended from 4.58 pm to 5.06 pm for a division in the House

Chairman: Can we get started again. Val, you were going to ask a supplementary. You had not started your supplementary to our group of academics, staying on this minority ethnic achievement.

Valerie Davey: Clearly, the language issue must be a subject of research somewhere. Who has done the research on the need to develop a mother tongue before you learn a second language? At what age is it best to learn the second language? Are the French and the Danes right in obliterating virtually the mother tongue and establishing a first language primarily amongst minority ethnic groups, or in New Zealand, where we saw immersion for Maori youngsters, is this right? Who is doing the research to establish best practice for language development?

Chairman

Who wants to go on this? Professor Tomlinson?

(Professor Tomlinson) I think right from the 1960s this was obviously of crucial importance, because there were so many children who were second language speakers, so there was a focus on the image of a second language and also a focus on the mother tongue. The first piece of research, which was done in the early 1970s which was quite large scale, was called the MOTET Project, Mother Tongue To English, and this was actually in Bradford and Bedford. It was looking at just this question: A Is the best way of learning a language and accommodating within an education system through immersion?@ You get into it and you do nothing but speak French in Quebec, or Maori if you are in the Maori system, or English or whatever, or is it better to start with your first language and then gradually move into the majority language? That is what the MOTET Project was doing. In Bradford, the children were being taught in Punjabi and then gradually moving to English; in Bedford, there was a group of Italian children being taught in Italian and gradually moving to English, and it was a resounding success. That gradual movement during the first few years of school really did seem to be the best way of getting children in, whereas the immersion thing was no good, certainly not within our system, and in Quebec, too, which was the other example. The major person who did research on this was a guy called Jim Cummings, he is Canadian and is still around, and he is the expert on best methods of teaching.

Valerie Davey: Can I ask any of you, have we established what is the best practice, and are we using it? It does not seem to me that we are, from my experience.

Chairman

How does one trawl for research which has gone on in this area? It must be quite simple, is it not, with the Directory of Educational Research?

(Professor Tomlinson) Professor Eve Gregory at Goldsmiths College is currently one of our experts on this.

Valerie Davey

Can I just ask very quickly on this, I know time is precious, one of the reasons that some of our Afro-Caribbean youngsters find it difficult is that we assume they speak English, and they do not and not by the standards that the teacher expects for exam purposes. We are not helping Afro-Carribean children in that regard. We ought to be respecting their term of English, but also helping them when it comes to exams. Does that ring any resonance?

(Professor Bynner) It does, indeed. There was a huge debate in the USA about that issue of Black English and whether it should be taught as a separate language and I think you are right. What the answer is I am not really sure. Clearly it is one of the many steps of a kind of disadvantage, and it is an extremely subtle one because it is not very obvious, and yet in reality there is an impediment to educational progress. So I think what we do about it, we probably should treat it like a second language, not in the sense that we then offer different courses= examinations in it, but we do adopt the approach that Sally has been talking about, that maybe in the early years there is a case for more recognition of it than there has been in the past.

Valerie Davey: Thank you.

Ms Munn

I just want to follow up on one little bit of research which you referred to, Professor Tomlinson, in the paper you submitted to us, which was this issue about children arriving from the volcanic island of Montserrat in 1995, who were well motivated and achieving when they arrived, but several years later had become demotivated and underachieving. Do we know why?

(Professor Tomlinson) It is interesting because it does partly deal with this language issue. It was really interesting, it was a PhD that a teacher from Montserrat had done. She followed the children, came with them in 1995 after the volcanic explosion, and the children were well motivated, were doing well at school, their small school system. They came in, of course, into urban schools here, which were not the best schools that they could have come into. She did find following the children through, that they did gradually become demotivated and less well achieving. One thing was the language issue: coming from the Caribbean they were speaking dialect, and the teachers did then regard it as poor English and were not giving them the help that they needed. This was a source of contention between the parents, because the parents assumed: A Well, the children are doing all right in the English system in Montserrat, and yet here you are telling us they do not speak English.@ It was not really handled sensitively, I do not think. So the dialect issue was one issue, but then I think the other issue that Gertrude actually found was this assumption that teachers had. Some of the teachers she followed did not even know where Montserrat was. Then they were told it was in the Caribbean and they then said: A Boing! Caribbean,@ and the children got the expectations that many other children from the Caribbean got.

Are you saying it is a mix of lack of recognition that there is a need for some additional help around language, but also there is a not too subtle racism there about A these children are of this background, they do not achieve well@ and that, along with failing to value their background and their language, leads to this downturn?

(Professor Tomlinson) Yes. It was a good example of there is no one simple explanation, it is a multi-faceted explanation for this. The teachers were not being overtly racist, because the teachers in the schools that the children were in, genuinely wanted to do well by the children, but all these preconceptions were there, and so the children were not getting the education they would have got if they did not have the assumptions.

Ms Munn: Okay. Thank you very much.

Chairman: I would like to move us on now to pupils from lower social economic groups and Jeff is going to open the questioning.

Jeff Ennis: I do not know if any of our witnesses are familiar with the Sheffield Hallam Study produced in 2000, which was commissioned by the Deputy Prime Minister, about education underachievement in the coalfields, because that was quite an interesting case study. One of the main findings within the report which is up to Key Stage 2, the children in the coalfield areas, up to the end of primary school, are performing up to the national average, yet by the time they get to Key Stage 4, the actual achievement levels are between five and eight per cent below the national average for five GSCEs A-Cs, and the staying-on rate thereafter is between eight and 15 per cent less than the national average. Is this an indication of low achievement in secondary schools or underachievement in the coalfield areas?

Chairman

If we start with Dr Smith on this one.

(Dr Smith) I am familiar with this study. It seemed, from what I can recollect, that it was again the children who received free school meals who were doing less well, and that continued from Key Stage 2 until Key Stage 4. Maybe Professor Bynner might disagree with this.

Do not worry about that.

(Dr Smith) Please correct me.

Not at all.

(Dr Smith) It is very difficult to track performance between Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 and to compare the levels. A level 4 at Key Stage 2 and if a child remains at level 4 at Key Stage 3, it is very difficult to say: A Well, they have made no progress over three years,@ so I have reservations about doing that. I am not sure how reliable that is and the nature of pencil and paper tests in themselves are notoriously reliable. It is the whole question of how well you can analyse performance on particular exams over time. That is really the difficulty I have with that sort of study, to be honest.

Professor Bynner?

(Professor Bynner) I have not read the study, I have to confess, but I think it raises another very important issue that we have not discussed. That is, if you like, the developing perceptions of what is available outside the education systems through the early teens. There are some very critical divides go on during that period, as we know, a real alienation, dropping-out of some kids, and one cannot help seeing that some of that is to do with their perceptions of the local labour market, the expectations of their parents, what they were expecting when they were younger, and that is another external pressure which education has to deal with, the futility of working hard and all the rest of it. Now, that is just off the top of my head, but I have got evidence from that in other studies that I have done, which may chime in with what you have just been saying from the Sheffield Hallam one.

Chairman: I am not trying to cut across you, here, but Jonathan wants to ask a supplementary.

Jeff Ennis: That is fine.

Jonathan Shaw

Conversely, Professor Tomlinson, you referred to Kent, which is the area of the country that I come from. In the Medway towns we have seen Key Stage 2 below the national average. Then if you take the results overall, which is an entirely selective process, the results are above the national average. I agree that once you extrapolate and look at the Club 25 scores, et cetera, there is a disproportionately higher percentage. One does wonder, because our Key Stage 1 is pretty average, it is a bit above average, and then it comes to Key Stage 2 and we fall below. There are those of us who say there is such concentration on the 11 Plus examination, that children and their parents do not worry about the SATs so much. It is rather converse, as I say, to what is happening in the coalfields, from the former dockyards to the former coalfields. Have you got any view on that?

(Professor Tomlinson) I think Kent is very interesting, is it not, because it is this example of how you can have high performing schools and high performance co-existing with low performing

schools and low performance. Where that starts and why it starts is interesting because at Key Stage 1 children appear to be doing more or less okay, do they not? We are left with anecdotal impressions here, because I do not think there is actually any research which can demonstrate why it is that the polarisation begins before the children enter secondary school. It could be, of course, that some primary schools are concentrating on teaching to the tests, lots of kids are having home tutoring, extra tutoring and so on, and so there is this polarisation beginning then. Certainly, once they get into the secondary schools, then the polarisation is there and just gets wider.

Would that explain the SATs tests, though? I am not sure it would. If you are saying they are having lots of home tutoring, one would think that, yes, that would be a particular part of the cohort, but that would have the same effect perhaps as the grammar school overall results, actually that would lift those at the bottom, as it were.

(Professor Tomlinson) Yes, there does seem to be a lot of home tutoring in that year from ten to 11. It is absolutely desperate in some homes in Kent.

Yes, it is indeed, that is right, a cottage industry.

(Professor Tomlinson) I have no evidence for this, because I have not done a study of home tutors, but it seems to me that they are concentrating on the 11 Plus rather than on the more general SATs.

Chairman: Can I just interject on something you said. You said there was no research done on this. I am looking at the written evidence from Stephen Gorard and Dr Smith and in your summary you say: A In the UK there is an absence of appropriate expense to assess the reasons why some of us do less well in compulsory schooling. Filling this gap was the main purpose of , 30 million spent on the ESRC Control Teaching and Learning Research Programme.@ , 30 million, and we do not know about Kent. What is this money being spent on?

Jonathan Shaw: It probably should have been , 32 million.

Chairman

Where has this , 30 million gone, Dr Smith? Has it gone down a black hole in Kent, or what has happened to it?

(Dr Smith) I knew we should not have written that.

Here you are, you have got all this money swilling around and you have not done the research.

(Professor Tomlinson) No. The ESRC ---

No, Dr Smith, first

(Dr Smith) Whether the purpose is unlikely to be met or not, I am not sure. I would not really like to comment.

Who is doing the research? Who is paying them the , 30 million?

(Dr Smith) It is the Teaching and Learning Research Programme, which is an ESRC-funded programme.

(Professor Tomlinson) A seven year programme. There are 14 different projects around the country.

When does it bear fruit, so that this Committee can learn from it?

(Dr Smith) I think the first phase is pretty much finished now. They are just looking at a whole range of different studies, for example, looking at science education, home school learning and things like that.

Nothing in Kent?

(Dr Smith) Teaching and learning.

Or the coalfields?

(Dr Smith) The focus is on the teaching and learning process. For example, there is a study in York, based at King= s, for example, looking at science education and how children learn concepts in science. So they are very much focusing, in this particular project, on the learning process.

Chairman: Jeff, you got rudely interrupted.

Jeff Ennis

It was very interesting that, Chairman. My next question is really more personal to Professor Bynner, but I do not mind if the other two witnesses want to comment as well. It is to do with the information provided, Professor Bynner, in your study. It is really to do with Government intervention mechanisms to try and correct social disadvantage, et cetera. In the report at page 32, you mention the fact we have already indicated about Sure Start being quite successful. You say: A Most obviously the elimination of childhood poverty through primary school seems likely to enhance educational achievement in the most disadvantaged sections of the community, reducing educational inequalities. Though it tends to be said that the league tables and the market driven choices between schools are, if anything, likely to be working against them.@ I just wondered if you would expand on what you feel about the imposition of league tables and the so-called market driven education economy specialist schools and the like, is that working against the social inequality model.

(Professor Bynner) This was a hot issue at the QCA meeting the other day. Obviously, collecting information about children= s achievement is enormously useful to find out whether the schools are delivering and the children are achieving. When that information is aggregated to provide in effect market information for consumers who, in this case, are parents, you have to ask: A Well, what happens to those children who have not got parents who are able to use it?@ That is why in some places it is illegal to supply such information about schools and make it public. It is used internally to improve what is going on, where it is failing, but it is not used to enable people to make things worse by shopping around through the information available to find the best place which will advise ---

So we should scrap the league tables like they are doing in Wales?

(Professor Bynner) Personally I think we should. I am delighted they did in Wales. This is my opinion, mind you. I am not really talking about very direct research, except the inference you have drawn from what I have written. Yes, it seems fairly obvious to me that one is not going to reduce inequality, one is not going to pursue or achieve the social inclusion/anti-social exclusion agenda while education is moving in that direction. There is a complete contradiction which often seems apparent in many of the policies we hear about today.

Jeff Ennis: I just wondered if the other two witnesses have got a point on that issue?

Chairman

Dr Smith?

(Dr Smith) Very briefly. In the consultation of the Welsh Assembly Government before they scrapped the league tables in Wales, I think a lot of the parents that they questioned did not use the league tables. They questioned the value on that account.

(Professor Tomlinson) Here league tables are used, are they not? Parents pursue them and the media makes a big deal out of them. I agree with John, here, that markets and social inclusion simply do not go together.

Mr Pollard

It adds , 10,000 to the value of your house!

(Professor Tomlinson) There is that about it, yes. Beacon schools, estate agents said values of the houses went up by beacon schools.

Chairman

Is this objective social science, or is it left wing ---

(Professor Tomlinson) That was a study of estate agents. Our colleague, Stephen Ball, at the Institute, has been doing normally longitudinal research over the last 15 years now, following children, they are adults now. He and his colleagues really have demonstrated that markets have had a negative effect academically and socially, and the publication of league tables has helped towards this. Yes, if we really want to change some policy now and actually make the whole agenda more genuinely inclusive, we would scrap league tables and make the information privately available to parents or within schools, by all means. This comparison of schools is pernicious in a way, because you are not comparing like with like.

Chairman: Jeff?

Jeff Ennis

One final question, Chairman. I have always had a fairly simplistic attitude towards education. In my 20 years of teaching, I always found that the best schools in terms of eliminating underachievement from the vast majority of students within a school were the ones that had a good social mix, where you got council estate kids mixing with middle class kids, et cetera. Do we have any evidence to substantiate that that is a fact, and do the three witnesses think that is the model we should be trying to achieve within more schools, a good social mix?

(Professor Bynner) Yes, we do have evidence on that direct point that the mix in schools is one of the factors that affects achievement from our longitudinal studies. The social class mix is important, exactly in the direction that you have indicated, and this is independent of other effects. So if you live in an area on a council estate that is served by a school, you are relatively going to do worse than if you are in the kind of mixed area that you have described. It is also true of achievement mixing as well. The more there is a school that is very low on the achievement ladder, the worse it is for those individuals who enter it. Yes, there is good evidence on that, no question.

Chairman

All the experimentation of the comprehensive agenda right through the1960s, 1970s and the 1980s, you have admitted at the beginning of this session has not changed social class and social mobility at all. All of this dickering around with mixing everyone together does not seem to be very effective in changing the social structure of our country.

(Professor Bynner) We must not mix social mobility with social gradients in education. We are wanting to flatten that system, so it is equal opportunity for all, regardless of your background. That is a critical issue and I think that is something that you can do something about. There is a problem in this area of you do not want necessarily to go in for the banding system that ILEA had, which got criticised very heavily that people were prevented from entering their kids into schools where they lived. There was some merit in it and it certainly did help to counterbalance this prevailing force of people who had got most getting more and then through their kids getting into the best opportunities that they possibly can have for them by using the information available and then focusing all their attention on that kind of route to achievement.

(Professor Tomlinson) We have had research from the 1950s. Jean Floud - who is a lovely lady, who is still with us at the Institute - was one of the first, and Will Hallsey(?), who is still working away at Oxford in his late 70s. Then all through the 1970s and 1980s, yes, Peter Mortimer the most recent one, I think, and Peter Weir. Research does show that the best results are achieved where there is a good academic and social mix, but we seem to find great difficulty in our housing patterns, if nothing else.

Chairman: We have only got 15 minutes in the whole of this session, so I am now switching back to Jonathan briefly on this topic, then we will move on to David.

Jonathan Shaw

Tower Hamlets was referred to earlier. I wonder if you have any comment on Government initiatives such as excellence in cities, which the Government tell us has seen a marked improvement in terms of overall academic success. I wonder if the panel have got any views on excellence in cities. They are certainly spending a lot of money there, does it make any difference?

(Professor Tomlinson) Tower Hamlets is a good example of a multi-faceted approach, there is no one approach. I think the local authority changing its policies, changing its attitudes towards the education of all children within the authority, more money helped - even if it was in terms of soft money through bids - but money was also important. Working with the parents much more was very important, schools actually taking on board all the issues that they were faced with and, yes, the school effectiveness research and school improvement research focusing on things like good leadership in schools and high expectations of all pupils and so on, which was picked up in Government policy and has been made New Labour policy. All these things came together and did actually begin to create improvements. Okay, we are not saying that all the kids in Tower Hamlets are doing marvellous and so on, but it seems to me it is a start, and if we could get all authorities, all areas where the achievements are low, actually all working together, it might begin to improve.

(Professor Bynner) It is certainly one important route, because we do know that vulnerability to disadvantage and poor achievement that comes from it is concentrated in places. So insofar as there are concentrated disadvantages in Tower Hamlets, it makes a lot of sense, but I think it has to be covered by universal approaches to families and children as well, because there are an awful lot of very disadvantaged kids or people with difficulties in rural areas and outside these conurbations, which you can join up services in and pour a lot of effort into. I think they are a good initiative, but do not forget the wider picture.

Jonathan: Thank you very much.

Mr Chaytor

If social class is such a strong determinant of under achievement in the view of two of you how do you explain the differential achievements of schools serving some of the catchment areas?

(Professor Tomlinson) Similar catchment areas is questionable. You have to try and get them statistically similar, and that is actually quite difficult to do. I remember the research David Smith and I did in the 1980s, we found that in some schools that were serving as we thought similar catchment areas some were doing better than others. This was seized on as, poverty is no excuse, whereas poverty is an excuse. In practice if you look at it more closely you are not really talking about similar areas, it is actually quite difficult.

(Professor Bynner) I would say that schools do matter. The work done by Peter Mortimer, the previous director of the institute, Pupil Progress in Primary Schools in London was a massive study to try and pin down the teacher effect. There was a variation, it did not account for a huge amount, 10 per cent or 20 per cent of the variation in ability.

Is that the consensus about the school effects, somewhere between 10 per cent and 20 per cent.

(Professor Bynner) In the book Inequality it said that schools do not matter at all once you really take account of families. The strength of Primary School Project by Peter Mortimer and co was exactly to show that that is wrong, there is a way of making schools more effective - strong leadership, structure, a key role for deputy heads, all that sort of stuff shows up in that study, it is not going to turn the world round totally but it is going to benefit a few children and overall that will improve the school as a whole. If everyone is working together in achieving then there is a kind of multiplier that everyone is going to benefit from.

Following that and linking that with what you said about league tables, is there an argument for league tables not with raw scores but published with value added scores?

(Professor Bynner) Value added are much better, that is a huge improvement.

Would that show the schools in similar circumstances who were making the full 20 per cent difference?

(Professor Tomlinson) There is even problems over value added because often, particularly in the urban areas, you start out with one cohort of children and there is so much movement in between schools that you never end up with the same cohort of children in the end, so factors like that get in the way of value added, although I agree with John the value added approach is much better. That can also show grammar schools that are not doing very well, where you know they have middle-class children.

Paul Holmes

You have already talked in various ways about Excellence in Cities and Sure Start, both schemes are very good but the limitation is, it seems to a lot of people, Sure Start concentrates on the wards with the highest concentration of deprivation, Excellence in Cities concentrates on cities, apart from a few limited experiments, like the one in Chesterfield which has started. What other mechanism would you use to get this extra money and extra support to the children who need it, who are not concentrated in certain wards or in inner cities? For example they have a postcode premium for universities in Holland that give 50 per cent more money to children who come from deprived areas, the money follows the pupil, it does not go into concentrated schools.

(Professor Bynner) Sure Start in Britain was bid for by partnership. There were 500 partnerships which were a mixture of local people and local authorities. In Scotland it was distributed through local authorities and therefore in one sense you are letting an existing system distribute funds where they seem to be needed, and that completely covers in effect the whole country. That is another mechanism. We seem to have forgotten Local Education Authorities are the means of delivering services to people in this respect. It is a debate to be had.

(Professor Tomlinson) One of the last things about Sure Start was it was not a competitive bidding process, as long as you could demonstrate you were doing a whole set of certain things then you got the money, did you not? Whereas a lot of the other interventions that we have depend on competitive bidding. I agree with John, we have forgotten about local authorities, I am a great fan of them. I do think it would be a good idea to ask them where the pockets of deprivation are. I currently live in Worcestershire and Worcestershire LEA knows where the deprivation is and this would be the mechanism for distributing it.

How far would the cynic say - not that I am a cynic of course - that Excellence in Cities and Sure Start is a way of, yes, you are giving more real money but there is a limited policy nationally and that is a way of rationing it. The Sure Start in Chesterfield that is just beginning is only going to 3 particular wards out of nineteen, and yet lots of the other wards have big areas of deprivation it is just not quite as concentrated. How far is it a rationing method for money or how far is it that it has not been thought through as a way of getting it to the areas that need it?

(Professor Tomlinson) It has always been a problem trying to locate your pockets of deprivation so that you can target the money on them. I remember in the 1970s in Birmingham they used to take big sheets of plastic and colour in where there were free school meals, where there was English as a second language and superimpose them and then put a ring round the darkest areas and give the money to those. There are various ways of finding out where deprivation is. I think we have gone too far with this selective competitive bidding culture and it would be much better to give larger amounts of money to many more areas and to rely on people like the local authority to distribute it.

Chairman

There is not an inexhaustible supply of money.

(Professor Tomlinson) There are several answers to that. My anecdotal view is we are a rich country and we do not spend enough on education and training.

Paul Holmes

One more specific question for Professor Tomlinson, although the others may want to chip in as well, in your opening comments you were quite optimistic about the fact that there is a lot of good educational research starting to appear and in the future government policy will be based on research. The evidence we have taken so far on specialist schools, for example, and what we are already hearing is Government policy is not based on educational research. Do you have any indication that it is going to be in the future that made you so optimistic at the start?

(Professor Tomlinson) No, not at all, I am just an optimist. We have heard that, yes, policy will be based on evidence, although there is a joke in academia, policy based evidence. It is quite the reverse, we do not think that policy is based on evidence.

Chairman

Perhaps we do not get the quality research to base policy on.

(Professor Tomlinson) It is nothing new, governments take research that seems to fit their policy some times, do they not? This has always been done. In academia we would like to see it the other way round. Okay, maybe we have our prejudices, and so on, as well.

Paul Holmes

The new Secretary of State who you are seeing after this meeting has not said, A Please come in and convince me@ .

(Professor Bynner) I think we underestimate the value of some research. Sure Start is based on very solid evidence about the impact of poverty on educational achievements. It takes time, it is cumulative, you cannot expect to do a bit of research and the next day the Government turns 180 degrees round. Gradually climates of opinion are supported by empirical evidence which governments respond to. They try and find the best way of solving the problems, for example if you get connections that comes from studies of young people who are not involved in education training or employment. Again you saw a very direct relationship, not entirely direct because it moves in steps, from pieces of work that have been done showing up what the factors were that predicted this sort of problem and then a service emerging connections to deal with it. I am not as pessimistic.

(Professor Tomlinson) Disability and special needs would be another good example where policy has changed.

Chairman

You have given Paul a whole raft of research based policy that has come through, what is worrying to us looking at diversity is we had a group of academics, your colleagues, who all had different interpretations of the research and the efficacy of diversity in secondary education. It is not easy for governments and politicians to assess what the right research is to base your policy on.

(Professor Tomlinson) We can pick out examples of specific policy that we think are okay, like Sure Start.

That is easy. What bit of research have you done that the Government have not provided a policy for that they should get on and do it?

(Professor Tomlinson) It is not specific research. We have pointed out, certainly John and I have, there are enormous policy contradictions. The major policy contradiction is between currently the move towards so-called diversity and the move towards selection, and so on, and the whole notion of inclusion in an education system. There is research which is now demonstrating that this is the wrong way to go if you really want to improve the education system for everyone. It seems to me that we can produce the research, some of it may be contradictory, but the research seems to be going in that way, it is pointing to a major contradiction in our education system at the moment. You cannot have a market place, a competitive education system and make it socially inclusive and bring social justice in for everybody.

Do you all agree with that?

(Dr Smith) I am not sure. I am relatively new to this. Research that I have read indicates that school selection has not lead to schools being in decline. I see contradictory evidence and I need to decide for myself not so much what I believe or do not believe but I need to balance them up. Your point about evidence-based policy, I guess it is the responsibility of education researchers to produce good quality research, which brings us back to the very first point you made right at the start about the quality of education research, it probably works both ways.

(Professor Bynner) I agree with the last point and also the previous point about the contradictions.

Ms Munn

Back when I was at school girls did not do as well as boys and girls were deemed to be at fault, now boys do not do as well as girls and the system is the problem. Is that a fair summary?

(Professor Bynner) I think it is these expectations of what is going on outside. I must say it is one of the great achievements, a very positive approach to girls' achievements in education has been going on a long time and it has paid off. Equal opportunities policies in the 70s have paid off in the long term. There is no longer a separate and inferior route for girls, when they are expected to leave school at the earliest possible age or maybe do clerical jobs, and that is it. They have now overtaken boys in university entrants, which is staggering, even doing better in A-levels. Currently I think the bigger problem in the gender issue is for boys without qualification, they see a very gloomy world ahead of them because there is not as much opportunity as there used to be.

The future is female!

(Professor Bynner) The future is education.

I am pleased that girls are achieving but I think there are wider implications for society if boys do not achieve. What should we do to enable boys to achieve more but not at the expense of girls achieving?

(Dr Smith) If you look at the gender gap over 25 years in English, a subject where girls are out-performing boys, it has been constant, girls have out-performed boys by the same amount over a 25 year period, which suggests that may have gone back further. If you want girls and boys to do the same in English you change the assessment system, you make the assessment system gender-neutral, which it is largely. In science and maths boys and girls performance is relatively the same, their achievement is relatively constant, the gap between the achievement is relatively constant. The point at which achievement between boys and girl took a great leap was in 1988 with the introduction of course work, and the national curriculum but beyond that the achievement gap has remained relatively constant.

Do I understand what you are saying is in a sense it is not the performance that was different it was the means of assessment.

(Dr Smith) I think that might well be the case. That is something that you need to consider and take into account. The issue with course work, again this is something where there is contradictory evidence, is some evidence suggests that course work has not made a difference between the performance of boys and girls and other evidence suggests that girls get on and do their course work and they do not have to cram at the last minute. In my mind I am not sure which one I agree with. The real issue is that in the course subjects of English, math and science. Maths and science the assessment system is rather gender-neutral, but where girls do do better is in English, and that has happened for some considerable time.

Chairman: I am afraid we are going to have to let you go to your next appointment. Can I thank you for attending, it has been a very refreshing evidence session. We would have kept you much longer if you had not had a hot date after this. Can I ask you as you are travelling onwards that if there is something that you would have liked to have said to the Committee would you drop us a line. Can we write to you if we need further information when we have digested today's session. It was a very refreshing day. Thank you very much indeed.