WEDNESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2002

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Members present:

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

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Memorandum from Professor Richard Pring (DP 03)

Memorandum from Professor James Tooley (DP 06)

Examination of Witnesses

PROFESSOR STEPHEN GORARD, University of Wales Cardiff, PROFESSOR JAMES TOOLEY, University of Newcastle upon Tyne and PROFESSOR RICHARD PRING, University of Oxford, examined.

Chairman

May I welcome three eminent professors who are going to help the Committee with their wisdom and research this morning, Professor Tooley, Professor Gorard and Professor Pring? Professor Pring and I have known each other a very long time, so welcome Richard and Stephen and James and thank you very much for spending some of your valuable time in helping the Committee. You will know that the Committee has set this whole parliament to look at secondary education. We have done a great deal of work on higher education in the last couple of years, on pre-school and individual learning accounts and other things, but in terms of inquiries we have been away from what some people would describe as mainstream education for some time, certainly secondary education. Therefore we are looking at the diversity agenda, the Government's commitment to have a whole range of different kinds of schools, what we believe is their linking of that with attainment of schools. We are then going to be looking at retention and recruitment of teachers, we are going to be moving onto admissions policies and we are going to be looking at performance of particular groups of pupils. Four parts to our inquiry and we shall be reporting them out individually. This morning's evidence is really around the diversity agenda. Thank you very much for the memoranda you have presented to us prior to this meeting; they have been most useful to the Committee and most illuminating. May I ask whether you in turn would like to say a few words to open up the discussion from your side?

(Professor Tooley) Having been expressly informed that we were not going to be asked to do that -

It would seem discourteous not to give you a chance to.

(Professor Tooley) You received my paper on Choice in Education: Global Examples and Evidence. What I am particularly interested in is the range of market approaches to education which are used around the world. I have given examples here of approaches in America and Europe, but I must be clear that there are also examples in Africa, in Asia, in every country imaginable. Some of the examples are particularly interesting when you see surprising places using some sort of private provision to enhance diversity; those in this report are the private grammar schools Germany and other examples which are equally surprising, as in the Swedish universal voucher system, one of only two anywhere in the world. There is a lot here to be going on with and I look forward to your comments on them.

Surprising in what way?

(Professor Tooley) Surprising as far as vouchers are concerned. We are often told in debates that these are right-wing ideas, that they find favour only in America and the Anglo-Saxon world. To see the most Social Democrat government in Europe introducing vouchers surprises many. The fact that Germany has a higher proportion of children and young people in private grammar schools, secondary schools, than England also surprises many and the fact that these schools can charge top-up fees and still receive state subsidy surprises many because we assume our Social Democrat partners in Europe will not be embracing these privatisation ideas. Surprising to many: encouraging to me.

(Professor Gorard) May I first of all apologise? I sent in a summary of three strands of the research I have been doing recently. What I could not do was prepare it especially for this inquiry. I gave you what was available off the shelf. I hope that makes sense. I have brought some other material which would back that up, but I am happy to leave that here for you to take away at the end. We are talking about a large number of different projects which converge in different ways. There are two main themes: one is the one about standards, about attainment in schools. My summary of that would be that I have yet to see any convincing evidence that any sector or type of school is differentially effective with equivalent pupils. Obviously there are differences between schools but we are talking about differences between school types. We cannot say that one particular type or sector of schools is particularly better or worse than another. The second strand which you may want to talk about is the potential cost of diversification which is to do with the extent to which social groups are or are not clustered within particular schools or types of schools, that is what I call social segregation, and the extent to which recent policies and possibly future policies might affect the composition of schools.

(Professor Pring) Very simply, if you are going to differentiate between different groups or different individuals, where that differentiation means an unequal distribution of resources then the onus of proof seems to lie on those who want to make the differences, usually a very simple principle of justice. In focusing upon today, I came to realise the enormous number of ways in which differentiation is taking place and there is different funding and there are different resources, yet all this arises from many different initiatives over a period of about ten or 15 years. There does not seem to be any overall set of principles which justifies that sort of differentiation. In other words, it has grown bit by bit ad hoc and there does not seem to be any overall vision or any overall principle by which that differentiation is justified. The onus of proof does lie on those who want to maintain this unbelievably diverse system of funding and admissions policies that we have. Secondly, particular problems are now emerging over the differentiation which takes place through admissions policies and funding of faith schools. I have to say that until very recently I have certainly been a strong supporter of faith schools, but there are some very real difficulties now. They are not easy ones to be solved and they are not ones with any simple solution because of the history. It does seem to me - and I should like to develop this afterwards if people wish - an issue which our society has to address very seriously and very urgently.

Thank you for that. May I open the questioning? This Committee was particularly attracted to looking at the experience of New Zealand which we visited fairly recently, partly because it seemed to have, in terms of the OECD scores, the Pisa study scores, something in common with our own country, that was that a pretty high percentage of people were doing rather well in terms of the scores. When we went to New Zealand, we found a society very similar to ours: a band, 60 to 65 per cent, of the population who seemed to be getting a fairly good education but this tail, for very different reasons this tail of significant underachievement which very much concerned the New Zealand politicians and educators. We have the same problem here, do we not? We have a large number of people getting a pretty good education in this country but a significant tail of underachievement. If diversity is not the answer, what is the answer to tackling this tail of underachievement in our country which to this Committee seems reasonably obvious? Are we wrong to believe this?

(Professor Tooley) You are asking what other things as well as diversity are required.

Yes.

(Professor Tooley) You might like to look at compulsion as another aspect in your agenda and particularly, as the White Paper indicates, post-14 when most of the problems of alienation, underachievement and so on occur in this country and in New Zealand and looking at the issue of whether school is the right place for all young people post-14 should be a very important part of that exploration. Certainly the diversity we shall be touching on and the diversity which occurs to a limited extent in New Zealand does not really touch on the types of diversity which are indicated in the White Paper which might be required post-14. Rather than, to put it crudely, giving everyone perhaps a combination of some watered down academic curriculum and some quasi pseudo vocational curriculum post-14, you might want to reconsider whether everyone needs the same type of schooling.

We might want to push you on that in a moment. Professor Gorard, is this idea of two thirds/one third and a big tail of underachievement an accurate picture?

(Professor Gorard) No, I do not think so.

Good. Tell us why.

(Professor Gorard) First of all I would have considerable doubts about the genuine effectiveness of international comparisons based on Pisa. I am doing some work on Pisa at the moment and I have some material here which I should be happy to leave for you to look at. The danger is that because of the different contexts and the different natures of the education systems, even the age banding and the promotion system within different national contexts, the variability that that causes is likely to be much larger than the variation between countries. Even what appear to be relatively large scores, even ignoring the rhetorical ranking you get in these international comparisons, even when the scores appear to show quite large differences, it would be difficult to say these are actually due to differentially effective education systems. That is a general blanket point. In terms of the notion of underachievement, it is one I have had difficulty with because I always wondered what the "under" is in relation to. Terms like "differential attainment" between particular social groups, "lower achievement", are all bound up in this notion of underachievement. We have to consider, if we have what we have been calling this underachieving group, what the assessment system, the qualification system, sets out for them. We have a GCSE system which was the merger of CSE and O levels which were designed for 40 per cent of the relevant age cohort and because of the criterion referencing in the marking we have this year on year move towards higher scores, higher grades. Let us not get into a debate about why that is, that is a red herring. The point is that the assessment system is there to discriminate. I am not advocating it should be, I am just saying that is what it does, it is there to discriminate. You always get some people who do better than others. The other extreme would be simply to allocate everybody some kind of certificate.

A lot of my constituents would say that is all very well and it is very academic, but if 20 per cent of the population of New Zealand leave school with no qualification, whatever the academic niceties of it, many people would think that the education system had failed those children; if 20 per cent of people go out of the school with no qualification, whatever the qualification is.

(Professor Gorard) I was not advocating the system, I was just saying the system as it is, is set up to discriminate between people. If we had a system where nobody failed any assessment, then questions would also be asked about the reality and nature of the assessment. You could change the form of assessment.

Ms Munn

Are we not talking about underachievement in relation to what we might expect people to be able to achieve?

(Professor Gorard) Yes.

The issue in areas like Sheffield which I represent is that you see proportionately fewer people getting the qualifications and not based on the fact that they are less intelligent. Surely that is what we are talking about? Not whether anybody should ever fail an exam but whether people are being given the kind of teaching and behaviour to learn in order to fulfil their individual potential.

(Professor Gorard) I am sorry if it sounds very academic, but you then have the perennial problem. If you take a psychological prediction of how well you would expect an individual to do in any future assessment, then you have a discrepancy between how they do and how you predicted, you have now way of knowing whether it was the final assessment or your original judgement which is wrong.

Chairman: We do not mind you sounding like an academic because you are one.

Ms Munn

That is in relation to an individual. What we are actually talking about is large parts of the country and usually we are talking about poor estates, we are talking about people overall. My colleague here is from Barnsley where classically people do not achieve, yet they have done intelligence testing of kids going into school and the kids going into school there are no less intelligent than kids going into school in Oxford overall. So why are they not doing as well in Barnsley or Sheffield as they are in Oxford?

(Professor Gorard) May I talk about South Wales which is an area of quite high deprivation where I have done considerable work? People have been suggesting that there was considerable underachievement there. It was said that the worst schools were schooling children to fail because standards had been lower than they had been in England. Where we had done comparisons between Wales and other regions of either England or Scotland which had similar economic and social profiles then the scores were pretty much as you would expect. If you did a contextualised value added analysis of what you expected pupils to achieve, then they were achieving pretty much what you would expect. The point is if you try to compare in some sort of league table system children from Kensington and Chelsea with children from Blaenau Gwent and then say because the children from Blaenau Gwent are not getting such high scores, even though they may do well on cognitive attainment tests, they must be underachieving.

That sounds like you are saying it is okay for poor kids to do badly.

(Professor Gorard) No, I am not. It is an odd thing for an educationist to suggest, but I resent the logic which says that we know there is a strong link between poverty and educational attainment, so let us do what we can for the poor children to improve their educational attainment. To some extent that is putting too much emphasis on education. Why do we start from the supposition that we should continue to have poor children? Why not deal with that issue first and then see what pans out in education?

Chairman

In reality we want to do both at the same time, do we not?

(Professor Gorard) Yes.

There is a rather pessimistic note in the material you sent us in the sense that you say many times that the real link is between poverty and underachievement, do you not? Are there not examples where children from poor backgrounds achieve significantly better than children from poor backgrounds in other parts and other schools?

(Professor Gorard) Those are the kinds of issues which the school improvement agenda is trying to tap into to see what we can learn. I do not think we can have a blanket policy of borrowing or practice of borrowing from sectors or countries or even regions. That is the point I was trying to make at the beginning. It is not a question of looking to the Pacific Rim and saying we will deal with these underachieving children in that way or looking at particular sectors of schools and saying we should be more like them or decorate our foyers in the same colours. Quite often the way in which these children are brought through depends on a charismatic teacher as much as anything else, the kind of thing for which you cannot bring in blanket legislation.

(Professor Pring) In many respects the government, both in this and the previous administration has put its finger on one very important thing and that is that education begins very early and one really has to put more resources into early years. Anybody who works in and is connected with the reception classes and early classes in our primary schools will realise that many youngsters come to school at the age of five already deprived both in the social skills which are going to enable them to perform well, but also in a whole range of other things. In tackling the problem which you identified, the focus upon early years in terms of resources and making sure there is good teaching has been a very good point in this present government. Secondly, quite frankly you are going to continue to achieve badly if you do not learn to read and write. The stress upon literacy and numeracy which the government has pursued, often against certain opposition, has been right. One can criticise aspects of it and to some extent the rigidity of it in some cases, nonetheless I think these were two policies which were quite correct in redressing these problems. We are now beginning to see the consequences of that. There is no doubt there are more people achieving well in secondary schools than was ever the case before. It takes a policy. It is a bit like turning around a battleship, is it not? I do feel that there have been significant changes. One further point which I should like to make is that there is certainly no doubt that there was a need to tighten up the curriculum framework in the 1980s and 1990s. There were lots of stories going back, I do not need to spell them out, where we feel many young people were deprived, often because of certain attitudes. A lot of work in the 1960s in America more or less said that schools do not make much difference. I think that permeated the consciousness of many people. There has been a changeover now and people do know that schools make a difference and we are benefiting a great deal from that. At the same time, having got to that stage, I do believe that there is a need for loosening up, often the things which constrain imaginative and good teachers in responding to the kind of needs as they perceive them in particular areas. There is a frustration with many teachers having to pursue a curriculum with some young people where they feel this may not be altogether appropriate. We have to be careful here. Nonetheless I think that is the case. Whenever I go to New York, where I was a fortnight ago, I always work in a particular school, which is within the state system. In New York there is a collection of what is called the consortium of central schools, which are all within the state school system but which have been really freed up to enable them to develop quite imaginative approaches to learning and to curriculum for people in Manhattan, in Brooklyn and so on. One sees some quite remarkable changes there. It is often due to a different sort of relationship, a different school, often with young people, as in the school that I was in, from every conceivable ethnic background and often people who have been ejected from their own schools. I should like to see now, in addressing some of the problems you have talked about, the possibility of experimenting with smaller schools, where personal relationships are very, very important in order to motivate those young people. There is room now for enabling teachers to have much greater professional freedom in tackling some of the sorts of problems you have been talking about.

Mr Turner

Who is the guardian of the child's interest in your picture of how education should work?

(Professor Pring) Essentially the parent in partnership with the school. I say "in partnership" because you cannot just hand it over. The idea that parents know best was part of Choice and Diversity, it was there, John Patten wrote it: quite clearly in many cases parents do not know best. Teachers very often know best for those particular children, so it has to be a very close partnership between the school and the parents in developing the education agenda of those children.

What do they see as the objective of the diversity agenda? Unless we are more or less agreed on what the objective is we cannot tell -

(Professor Pring) My view which I put in my paper was that there is no one overall objective. If you look at the very different kinds of diversity, the very different sets of funding, the very different admissions policies, which have grown without any kind of rational basis over a period of about 20 years, you cannot talk about any overall objective.

Indeed. That is why I was going to ask your colleagues the same question.

(Professor Tooley) What is the objective of this government?

No, the longer-term diversity.

(Professor Tooley) I must say that the word "diversity" is probably a red herring. The words to stress are "choice" and "competition", perhaps "entrepreneurship". Diversity may or may not be an outcome of that. In many areas of our lives diversity does not occur when you have choice and competition. For example, all the men here are wearing suits and ties and we go to supermarkets which are roughly similar, even though they are the result of competition. The diversity aspect is not something which is to be pushed initially. It is something which could be an outcome of choice and competition: it may not be.

(Professor Gorard) As my comments earlier were suggesting, I am not clear what the problem is that diversification could be a solution to. I am not saying there is no problem, but I am not absolutely clear what that problem is. In the data I read there is not a crisis that I certainly see reported daily through the media in any of the educational components we are looking at here. I am guessing that I was not brought along here to express my opinion on current policies or anything else, but to talk about where the data we have, which is largely based on official statistics, leads me to. I certainly was not intending to be depressive; certainly not intentionally. My intention was to look at what the data say. What I am guarding against is having initiatives which are there without clear evidence to solve problems which have been unclearly formulated. The first thing to work out is exactly what the problem is that we are trying to sort out. One of the papers I sent you was looking at what we call the determinant of school compositions and there seem to be three major chunks. Geography was a clear one. We have already mentioned geography and it has to be the main thing. Where you live largely determines where you go to school. One of the indications about the major determinant of where people go to school and therefore the outcomes of those schools by whatever mechanism would be, rather than thinking about specialisation or diversification, some form of extra money, if there is extra money to be had, to be given to those areas which actually need it and making the grants or awards geographical. The second major determinant is the type of school organisation. What is absolutely clear is that currently areas which have more diversification, different types of schools, have more socially segregated intakes to their schools. As we know from the school effectiveness and school improvement literature that can have an effect on outcomes. Outcomes are very sensitive to the compositions of schools, so my view would be that we look at the composition of schools first and that would not necessarily mean you would want to rush straight into diversification. You would want to think about the admission policies. If you take as an example the recent policy of specialism, specialist schools, what appears to happen is that in areas where specialist schools are prevalent, there is more segregation than in areas where they are not. The majority of the long-standing specialist schools are also tending to be either voluntary aided, voluntary controlled or foundation schools. What they have in common, and some of the other schools I have put in my study, is that they have different admission arrangements and different over-subscription criteria to the LEA schools with which they are competing in their local markets. In the LEAs where that is not the case, such as one LEA in our study in the south-east of England, specialist schools have to use the same criteria as the local comprehensives and the results from that school are indistinguishable from the other schools in the LEA and the composition of the schools is indistinguishable. It seems to me that what is driving this is not the nature of the schools or even the funding, but the ability to use different admission arrangements to the local area. My last point is to agree with what James Tooley said, which was that in areas where there has been a considerable choice of schools and there has been freedom of movement as there has been in some parts of New Zealand recently, then social segregation actually declines in the period of free choice and diversification was not an outcome. It was not a market-driven/market-led thing. Most of the diversification which Richard Pring was talking about in the system has been imposed by people saying they want these kinds of schools. That is not bottom-up demand. Generally if you have a choice system in schools, what appears to happen is that parents are trying to choose between ranked uniform schools.

Jonathan Shaw

I should like to ask Professor Pring to expand on his idea of piloting smaller schools. You mentioned this briefly. Could you tell the Committee what you think smaller schools might provide?

(Professor Pring) I am not suggesting that smaller schools are ideal for everybody. Where you get areas where there are particular difficulties because of the social background, the economic context and so on, the personal relationships between teachers and pupils, this personal knowledge, this understanding people very, very well, is extremely important. There may be many young people who do not find it easy to be in schools of 1,200, 1,300, 1,400 with all the implications that has for personal knowledge. Many schools do do a very good job at breaking down these large numbers into units in which there is a great deal of excellent pastoral care. The small school is what really needs to be explored for certain young people at certain ages. It may be defective in certain things, it will not have that range of expertise in the school, but that close personal relationship, establishing good social skills, motivating young people may be much more important in the long run than ensuring they have first-class teachers of history, geography, mathematics, etcetera. I think that is something which is certainly worth exploring. There is quite an interesting movement in this country called The Small School Movement and it is one which ought to be taken seriously. When I have seen this in the United States what happens is that they shape schooling very, very differently. They use the community much more. If they have excellent mathematicians in this school of only 120 pupils aged between 14 and 19 then there is a link to Hunter's College just down the road in 97^th Street. Where they have particular talents in certain things, they bring in the community and this school is something exciting, one of the few schools in New York now which has managed to get rid of the metal screens whereby they check whether people have knives and guns and so on. They have absolutely transformed relationships in that particular area because of the close intensity of the relationships which take place between excellent teachers and the pupils. I am not saying it would necessarily work but I think there has to be room, in addressing some of the problems which the representative of my home town of Sheffield came across, to start looking at other ways. I do believe that in education, certainly in my education and that of many people here, being in an institution where you really feel you belong, rather like an extended family, can be crucial for certain people.

We have been advised that 50 per cent of the exclusions of youngsters in secondary schools takes place in those early years, the first two years of secondary school and that perhaps the reason why youngsters manage to stay in primary school is because of the relationship with one teacher. They have the focus of that one teacher rather than rattling around in a secondary school. Is that the group you are referring to?

(Professor Pring) That is right. The transition from primary to secondary, though I would not be able to lay my hands on clear evidence but it has been very well researched, is an exceedingly difficult time for many young people, especially if there are other background features which may make them less steady. There are varying ways in which you can do this. I am not really advocating the Oxford collegiate system for Sheffield secondary schools, but the idea of groups of schools thinking collegiately, where the unit is much smaller but where they are able to draw upon the resources of each, is one in which one would be able to overcome some of the impersonal factors which some young people feel when they move to a school of about 1,300. Last night I was chairing a research committee at John Mason School in Abingdon where we have been interviewing a lot of young people when they first come up from the primary school. For a lot of these young people it was a deeply unsettling experience: the fear of bullying, actual bullying - though bullying now is stretched so widely it embraces even looking at somebody - the anxiety amongst many of these young people. I do not have proof but one feels that it leads to all sorts of anti-social behaviour. I think this is something worth experimenting with, when in a place like New York, which for goodness sake has had many difficult problems to cope with, they have managed to incorporate this, side by side with other larger schools.

Mr Pollard

In my constituency I have a Steiner school and I am very attracted by the way in which they operate and what they turn out. I understand from the little research I have done, that Steiner work in some disadvantaged areas and actually turn out good quality at the end. Could and should that be included in the government's diversity agenda and Montessori as well?

(Professor Pring) I always find it rather sad that in a system which is advocating diversity, and has ever since Choice and Diversity, actually still wants to exclude schools like Steiner and Montessori which do offer an alternative way. This is not diversity in terms of changing resources or in terms of objectives which I do not particularly appreciate. This is people who have a very distinctive philosophy of education which many parents would embrace and yet which we are, in a way other countries do not, excluding from the diverse system which we are advocating. I quite agree. They really do stress the importance of that holistic view of the whole person.

Some of the other diversity we have talked about such as specialist schools is just a way of leading new money into schools. It is a game which is being played in one sense.

(Professor Tooley) The best examples are Denmark and the Netherlands in particular but other European countries who have state funding of Montessori and Steiner schools through their quasi voucher system or whatever you like to call it, public subsidy of those schools. What I advocate in my memorandum is something similar where we do not have the top down diversity agenda which governments seem to like, but we allow the bottom-up diversity agenda to emerge and through choice and competition to bring out what the people really want. It is very interesting that Professor Pring has focused on this whole secondary versus primary school split. I like to say that is an anachronism introduced under the 1944 Act; most of the other things in the 1944 Act have been abolished but that still remains and causes great difficulties for students. In your Steiner and Montessori schools you have all three schools. In the private schools I am working on in India and Africa you have all three schools, starting in nursery and ending in class ten. They are eminently satisfactory. They are chosen by parents because they alleviate most of the problems discussed here. Diversity rather than that top-down thing could well include focusing on genuine reforms which would help students and parents cope with schooling and abolishing that distinction would be a good step.

(Professor Gorard) I want to agree with what both my colleagues have said which is that Steiner is an example, but there are many other examples, of quite a few very small, very challenged schools, which have survived over a period when in a sense their existence has not been encouraged. I am talking also about the invisible sector of very small private schools which quite often have a distinct ethos for particular groups. I am thinking of the South Wales coalfield valleys where there are many very small private schools which deal with very, very poor children with very poor facilities but which seem to do a reasonable job. These are the ones which have emerged bottom-up. They are market driven in the sense that these are what the parents are wanting in these communities and they are different from state or large group-imposed forms of diversification. I think we should judge all these in terms of what they are in their own right. I am sorry to pick on the specialist school programme again but I just take that as an example. What I mean by that is if you were to take away the differences in admission criteria, the over-subscription criteria and also the ability to select and the extra money they would get, what is left that people would be wanting from those schools? A similar thing with the faith-based schools. People say faith-based schools are popular but they are like the Welsh-medium schools in Wales: people see them as being better schools and the reason the advocates of these schools move very quickly from talking about these schools as schools in their own right, with these characteristics which are desirable, to schools which appear to be better than neighbouring schools suggests there is not much appeal in their sui generis status as either faith-based or specialist schools. People are saying these schools are better because they are actually better schools. We could have done it some other way and we would have got similarly better schools. That is very different from these very small schools thriving under very difficult circumstances, quite often in very poor communities.

Professor Pring said earlier on that faith schools need looking at. What did you mean by that and could you tease out a little bit on that because the government are moving in a completely different direction from what you were perhaps suggesting?

(Professor Pring) That is right. There are now four Moslem schools in the country and within the Moslem community they are now wanting quite a few more. In terms of fairness in so far as you have faith schools with different admission policies for the Church of England, for Roman Catholics and also for an increasing number of Jewish schools, then, quite rightly, to be consistent one would also need to enable the voluntary aided status for Moslem schools to be established. On the other hand a policy which functioned in the past, in the history certainly of Roman Catholic schools both here and in Australia which I am quite familiar with, was enabling a population which generally was an immigrant and working class population to develop a certain sense of dignity and to come into the mainstream of public life. Those same sorts of arguments do not work now, although I can see that they could work within the Moslem community. Now what we shall be getting by pursuing that policy is the division of schools not just on faith grounds but also on ethnic and racial grounds. I really do feel that one of the most important social objectives in this country is, to put it in the words of that marvellous book Jonathan Sachs has just produced "the dignity of differences", to enable people to live together, learning from each other and respecting those differences. I am not advocating a relativism or anything like that, but the idea of finding schools where people's own distinctive philosophy or religious life is respected, is promoted and through which they interact with other people so there can be that respect. If we do not do that then society is going to be in for an exceedingly difficult time. You would have failed the most important educational objective then quite frankly which is to enable different communities to live in harmony together and with respect and to learn from each other in the John Dewey principle, if I might be allowed now to quote John Dewey who was for a long time on the Index of forbidden books. That is what I really would want and unless we address that issue we shall be failing. Secondly, there is no doubt, the research now is fairly conclusive on this, that the faith schools which were philosophically promoted under the 1944 Education Act, which were to enable the nurturing of faith within particular communities, have now also become a means of selection on grounds other than faith. That is now causing quite considerable difficulties in some communities where people are not able to attend their local school simply because they do not pass a religious test and therefore have to move quite a long way away to the disruption of that local community. I do think this is something which is very difficult to address. It is one thing which always gets put on the back burner as soon as any new Secretary of State is appointed, but it is one which has to be faced.

Mr Baron

May I press all three of you further on the actual role of government in education? It does seem that to a certain extent the diversity agenda is being led by the government rather than demand driven. There are schools in my constituency who are becoming specialist schools or are trying to become specialist schools because basically they receive more finance as a result of it. It is not necessarily the parents and teachers getting together and saying they want to become a specialist school. Having said that in your own different ways you criticised or are not happy with the present system, if you had a blank sheet of paper, what would be the role of government? There has to be a role for government to ensure certain provisions with regard to standards, but do you think we are going down the wrong track?

(Professor Gorard) My answer would be that I could not really say. None of the evidence I have would directly bear on the question. I could you give you an opinion as an individual member of the country, but that presumably is not what I am here for.

I should like your opinion.

(Professor Gorard) Looked at from my side of the counter, there appears to be too much intervention. It is not that any particular intervention is misguided or wrong. You need a period in secondary education where people know the rules, they know what is going on, they try to work well within it and they are given the resources and the time to do that. The other thing goes back to my point about equity. The government's role would be to ensure that there is an equitable distribution of education resources. The levels of pupil funding in particular areas still seem odd to me: the way that appears to have historical and no longer particularly relevant things; the fact that in some areas children can get means-tested free transport to a school which is not their nearest school, in some areas they cannot and so on. It seems we have this post-code lottery thing. I would say government's role would be to overcome that, to break down the barriers to equity across the secondary sector.

(Professor Tooley) I suppose the answer, if I am wearing my politically-feasible hat, is that I would say "Not a lot". If I am wearing my thinking-the-unthinkable hat I would say "No role at all". Probably I should keep the politically-feasible hat on for this occasion, so "Not a lot". I do not see why, provided we have accountability - this is the key we are looking for - in the education system, government has to be involved in any of the areas you indicated: curriculum, assessment, league tables. All these things as far as I am concerned just ossify the state system in ways which are extremely hard to change. Professor Pring talked about moving a battleship. Why should something as important as education be like moving a battleship? We are used to great flexibility and innovation in other areas of our lives. I would say none of those things are needed but with my politically-feasible hat I would see funding as necessary, which is why I advocate something like a voucher system, a learning credit system, which could allow the accountability brought from parents - no they are not perfect, of course they are not perfect, but perhaps they are the least imperfect method we know of keeping standards high - to come in. The way I see it, the private sector is better than the public sector in this area. I respect Stephen Gorard's work immensely, but the one problem with the school effectiveness work which he points to is that it takes the status quo as a given by and large, it is looking at state schools, so one of the factors which does not come through is whether or not they are privately managed. There has been work on this, starting from James Coleman's work in America in 1982 and going through a range of World Bank studies looking at a range of countries. These studies are very sophisticated, they control the school choice process, multi-redefinition analysis and so on. They control all these things and uniformly they find that private schools attain higher standards than the public schools. The only time it does not work is in the Philippines in terms of mathematics. The rest of the country studies from a whole range of countries are the same and private schools are uniformly more cost effective than the public schools. If that is true in most studies, and I suspect it would be the same if we could do those sorts of studies elsewhere, that raises a question: what on earth is government doing in here? In terms of standards the private sector has better standards.

Chairman

The Department for Education and Skills should just be disbanded and let them get on with it.

(Professor Tooley) I said that was my politically-feasible hat so yes, of course. No, it would have a role in ensuring funding arrangements.

Professor Gorard, that speaks to your research not merely to your opinion as an individual citizen. Do you have any comment on Professor Tooley's views there?

(Professor Gorard) When I do work in the school effective genre, which I do, it is largely to combat what would appear to me to be unsupported claims, it is to go over old ground. So in a sense we would have no argument about some of the claims about school effectiveness. It should be clear that the kinds of fee-paying schools he is talking about in the World Bank studies are not perhaps what people around the table would imagine. We are not talking about Eaton and Harrow here. We are talking about what I would refer to as the invisible sector. These are quite often religion-based, very small schools with very poor facilities taking in poor children from disadvantaged circumstances because, for whatever reason, the parents want to opt out of the state sector. Quite often they have grown up out of home schooling, villages where parents decided to leave their children out of the state sector, provide their own education, probably with bought in curriculum materials, possibly from the US and then a neighbour has asked if they would take his child and then another and eventually they have whatever number, four children, and suddenly they are a school.

(Professor Pring) What one has to say about private schools is that of course there are some very good ones and there are some pretty awful ones. Just saying private education is better than public education is really one of the daftest things I have heard yet. Could I just say something about the assumption behind the question? The question assumed that things seemed to be going wrong. A lot is not going wrong. What we are talking about is how to improve a system which in many respects is a very, very good system. I do not think saying there are things we can do to improve a system should be seen as a trenchant criticism of what is going on.

Mr Baron

That was not the implication. I think there is a general acceptance that things could be much better. I am not saying things are going terribly wrong in every sense, because that is obviously not true, but things could be much better. I am just trying to explore, through yourselves, ways of how we could make it better and whether the government has a role here.

(Professor Pring) Okay. There are things we ought to acknowledge which are going right. Our department works entirely with comprehensive schools and we are about the only education department in the country which does and I get fully supported by Oxford University in pursuing this policy. The reason is because I believe that some sort of comprehensive form of education must be the way forward if we are going to have a coherent society where everybody really counts. As a result of that we are a very school centred department. I know every comprehensive school within Oxfordshire well and there are some excellent comprehensive schools. When a comprehensive system is working well it does produce the best education for all young people, including the most able. Of course there are poor schools, but there will be poor schools in any system and then it is a question of how you do that. An enormous amount has been done now in making that progression from early years, development of literacy and numeracy, but what things can be done to improve it? I think there is still this tail of underachievement. May I say that this is not just a problem here, but it is a problem in many, many countries? For some reason it is simply very, very difficult to get some people through. It has to be tackled. I suggested experimenting in certain areas with more person-centred schools. I think where things have improved over the last few years this goes across different administrations and indeed it was the Conservative administration which insisted upon tightening up the accountability of schools. When I first started teaching in Camden Town many years ago, there were some brilliant teachers and there were some pretty awful things going on. When I started teaching I wrote to the headteacher and asked for my timetable for when I was to start in September. He wrote back to say he would give it to me on the day I arrived. I had hoped to spend my summer preparing my lessons. I arrived. "What did you do at university?" I said philosophy, so they gave me the slow learners. That is not something which could be allowed to happen now. In many ways the system has much greater accountability and has become much more professional but we have reached the stage now in which the level of accountability and the bureaucracy which is imposed upon us is so massive it becomes demoralising and it becomes frustrating. One of the things I have been advocating, but obviously either not coherently enough or because I have no power or authority, is that it is about time the Audit Commission really addressed the massive, massive amount of money which goes into throttling creativity in schools. One thinks of tier upon tier of inspections. I got a letter the other day from the DfES which said they are now starting up another set of advisers around the country looking at professional development. I wrote, tongue in cheek, to ask how this group of advisers relates to the group of advisers which the Training Agency has. Finally they rang me up to explain that they were just about to sort out that problem. I told them that at Oxford when we appoint people, we usually have a job for them to do before we appoint them and we do not appoint them first. I have seen so much of this now, this tier upon tier costing millions and million and millions of pounds. Unless we actually get to grips with that, there is going to be a strangling effect upon the creativity which is there in schools. It is diverting a massive amount of resources from teaching and the actual job which goes on to all these people who are now encouraged out of the classroom to have meetings and go around in big cars. If you want to know where we are going wrong, we are strangling with bureaucracy and we ought to do something about that. That would release an enormous amount of potential in schools. I go round lots of schools, I work in these schools, I teach in these schools and I am constantly amazed by the dedication, the experience and sheer brilliance and creativity of many teachers. For heaven's sake let them work at it.

May I summarise what I think the three of you believe? You believe that there is too much bureaucracy and interference. The government is not spending enough time ensuring there is fairness, certainly with regard to funding, and as long as accountability is in the system - and that is probably the government's prime role and accountability has to be there - it should be a much more hand's-off approach. Certainly going round the schools talking to headteachers and teachers that view would get a lot of support. Am I wrong in drawing that conclusion from the three of you? Where do you differ with that view?

(Professor Pring) I agree.

(Professor Tooley) I could more or less subscribe to that.

With your politically-correct hat on.

(Professor Tooley) Yes; politically-feasible hat.

Would you agree with that, Professor Gorard?

(Professor Gorard) Yes.

We all agree with regard to the issue of diversity, which is our brief at the moment. It does seem that we are going slightly wrong, despite what you say, in the sense that diversity is being, not forced but certainly being led by the government. How can we put this right in the sense that, in my view certainly, it is not being demand led in a lot of places and certainly within my constituency? That is what we are looking at at the moment as a Committee. What should we do to put this situation right?

(Professor Tooley) You should allow demand to be expressed. The way you do that is through some form of money channelled to parents which they can use at the school of their choice, public or private.

How would you actually do that? Through a voucher system?

(Professor Tooley) Yes, that is one option. You do not have to call it a voucher system.

Chairman

If you call it that system, I do not think it has much hope of success.

(Professor Tooley) The Institute of Directors call it a passport system. Learning credit is a nice name. A rose would smell as sweet by any other name. If we all agree, and we do seem to agree, that one problem is that diversity has been imposed top down and that the desirable form of diversity, if at all, is bottom up, then you have to allow bottom up diversity to be expressed. We have had great praise for small schools, small private schools, Montessori, Steiner schools. All these schools should be allowed to flourish and similar schools should be created and allowed to grow. The only way you can do that is through, call it what you like, a voucher system.

Mr Baron

Where parents actually have a choice.

(Professor Tooley) Yes; it is the only way.

Chairman

Professor Gorard, you have done a lot of work on why parents choose particular schools. Do you think what we have now should be scrapped and we should introduce some sort of voucher system?

(Professor Gorard) No, I do not; I did not indicate that. I was hesitant to answer the question about what the role of government should be and that was what my hesitancy was, about

agreeing to the summary you gave. I do not disagree with it but obviously there is going to be a point at which you have to say you cannot allow demand to determine the nature and type and number of schools in this country because of the nature of what the schools might be doing and teaching and so on. Unfortunately I do not have a solution. I cannot stand and say yes, this is what we should do.

(Professor Tooley) A regulatory framework.

(Professor Gorard) I agree with what Richard Pring said earlier about the comprehensive system and about comprehensive schools, but I find it odd that he does not have a comparator and has only one system to make the claims. I do think the claims are substantiated by other work There is no particular problem; obviously we can get it better. I suppose my role is simply to ask people to look very carefully at claims of the superiority of one school or one type of school over another. My argument would be, without getting too technical, that you do need four data points and you need a proportionate approach to this. Over your period of sitting you will be talking to experts and they will be arguing about whether we should use this technique or not this technique to decide on school effectiveness. There is an issue about that for me. Sorry to stick on specialist schools but if you take those as an example you would want to take a point before they started, look at the scores or the standards in those schools, divide them into two groups, those which are going to remain comprehensive and those which are going to change over the coming years, roll forward to today - and we have data for all of this - and look at the same two groups, the ones which have become specialist. What you get in most school effectiveness studies - and that is why I disagreed with James Tooley's summary to some extent about the school effectiveness work - is that they simply look at two data points. They look at one group of schools and they have these schools, however contextualised and value added they are, and then they look at another group of schools and they assume the causal mechanism underlying the difference is the nature of the schools. If you take before data points and you take these schools before they became this type, then it is absolutely clear that none of the sectors have any advantage over any other. In other words, in terms of equity stick with comprehensives.

Mr Baron

Provided there is proper accountability there, where would you stop demand dictating what type of school one had locally? You said there that you cannot allow demand to run its full course broadly speaking. Where would you draw the line, provided you had accountability?

(Professor Gorard) I do not know. Is that an allowable answer?

It is an allowable answer. I am just intrigued.

(Professor Gorard) I can come back to you on that.

If you could.

(Professor Pring) I think the role of government must be significant. You cannot live in a modern society where, if everyone is going to have the right to opportunity, there has to be distribution of a great amount of resources to enable everybody to have the proper education, to be able to contribute to their community and also for their own personal welfare. It goes back to the 1944 Education Act and I had to learn this when I was a civil servant. Really you need a government to provide the legal framework within which everybody can get access to proper schooling. It needs the provision of schools which will enable them to get that education, it means the proper supply, payment and recruitment and training of teachers. It means ensuring that resources are spread equally and are not given on grounds which cannot be justified in terms of differences between different youngsters, etcetera. That is it. Where one adds to that now from the 1944 Act is quite rightly that the government can no longer hold back from ensuring a proper framework for the curriculum. I think the whole specialist schools initiative is one of the daftest things which has happened quite frankly. There is no justification for the differential funding for somehow having PE experts in Wantage. It becomes a question of what degree and also of accountability to make sure the legal framework and resources are properly used. The dispute becomes a question of how far we should allow a certain amount of experimentation within that system in order to deal with problems which are by no means unique to this country. Secondly, the extent to which that curriculum should be prescribed and to what extent there should be freedom within that overall framework. Those are the real points of difference.

Valerie Davey

May I pick up the general acclamation for equitable funding, which was one of John's major themes? Does that mean equal funding?

(Professor Pring) No. Back to the old Aristotelian principle: you treat everybody the same unless good grounds can be given for treating them differently. There may always be grounds which you can put forward for saying that these particular children, or these particular areas will need more funding. You would have to justify this and it might be because these are particularly deprived areas or it may mean these children have particular disabilities which require greater investment. I think "equitable" means that you actually justify differences and you do so on grounds which are educational or social which are quite transparent and quite public.

Would the other two agree with that?

(Professor Tooley) Yes, it is a well accepted principle. It is embedded in our system now that children in deprived areas with certain deprived backgrounds get more funding than others.

So your voucher scheme, which you are advocating would be differential.

(Professor Tooley) It could well be, yes. The other aspect of the equitable funding which is worth bringing in is that parents might also want to pay more for their schooling. They may value education more highly than others and they should be allowed to do so, providing that base of equity is met through the funding. That is a very important principle.

(Professor Gorard) I feel that at least temporarily you would not simply divide the pot up equally. You would look for areas where there was disadvantage and try to do something to that. There is a danger of reinforcing poor practice or whatever, but you cannot overcome that. However, it would have to be a temporary measure. What I was saying was that probably the current funding arrangements owe a lot to long-term history and they ought to be regularly updated, using the transparent ideas that Richard Pring was talking about.

May I continue with the issue of social inclusion? Although we can see, as we indicated earlier, that there are links between poverty and achievement or lack of them, the underlying philosophy, certainly of this government and I should say of everybody around this table, is that there is an underpinning concern for social inclusion. How far do you think admissions policy should be the criterion for assessing how far we are getting with that?

(Professor Gorard) I do not think I would say that should be the criterion. It might be one of the main agencies, at least in the short term, by which you could actually achieve such inclusion, by modifying and ameliorating the admission arrangements.

You showed from the research and the work we have had from you that different systems lead to greater or more, not inclusion but sadly segregation. I should like to make it positive. What are the aspects then? It seemed to me from our earlier conversation that it was admissions, but what aspects would you give then to be those which we need to look at or differentiate between schools in whatever aspect to bring about social inclusion?

(Professor Gorard) We are stuck with the geography issue which is that because of the differential nature of the housing we have the intakes of schools, if they are rigorously tied to housing, are clearly going to be socially segregated. It may not be so much the case in central London but in most of the rest of the country where you live determines whom you go to school with and the education, parental occupation, income, background of the parents of other students in the school. I would say that long term you might work to overcome that issue - there are countries in the world where that is not the case - so that there is mixed housing. There are even experiments going on in this country with mixed housing where presumably long term this issue would not arise and you could simply allocate children to their nearest school. At least until we get that, you would have to allow freedom of choice because that appears to be the thing which reduces segregation, but without diversity and without constraints. In my view you would have to have some kind of means-tested free transport to the school of choice. What a lot of LEAs are doing at the moment is saying that because the central government legislation says you can express a preference for any school you want, you can do that, but they are only going to take a bus to the nearest school. So if you choose a school which is not the nearest school, then they are not going to pay for it. So parental choice only applies to certain people who can afford it, people who can drive Volvos to the next nearest school. That is a problem. The second issue is that many LEAs are providing free transport of that type to the non-nearest school if that school is of a particular type, like a religious or particular language school. That is just driving up segregation. You would want to stop that in order to drive up inclusion.

Are there any comments from either of the others?

(Professor Pring) There has been a lot of work on the admission policy, particularly from Anne West at the London School of Economics and Schagen at The London Institute. What one has is a mess, quite frankly. It is not just a mess that there are many different sorts of rules on admissions, which can be very bewildering for parents who have not got to grips with all this, but also because even when the rules are made explicit, there are other implicit rules which are operating which people are not aware of. There is a lot of work on this and once again transparency is important but also once again admission rules should only discriminate where good grounds can be given. One of the ways in which discrimination is being made and it certainly comes out of Anne West's work, is where you are allowed to interview. In some admission policies you can interview, in others you cannot interview. An interview then becomes a hidden way in which you differentiate between people, not for officially given grounds, but for grounds which enable you quite frankly to exclude certain people because they will not help you very well to acquire a greater proportion of As to Cs and thus shove you down the league table. There has to be a look at admission policies but I would want to say less choice quite frankly and I would want to say that people would be expected to go to their particular local school and where you would find a popular view against that, then one begins to look at the reason for that and where those reasons for that are due to bad leadership or one thing or another, you do something about that. Where it is due to very, very real difficulties, then you put in whatever is needed to make that school work. In other words, I do not think you are going to improve the system simply by getting freedom of choice. That would advantage certain people. There is a lot of evidence now that this would advantage certain people; some people have the choice and other people just do not have the choice. If one of our greatest concerns in our society is really how to deal with disillusioned young people, those who are alienated from the system, then we have to concentrate on making sure they are not further disadvantaged by having to go to schools nobody else wants to go to. That must be one of the most important things we have to address.

Chairman

Do you not feel at all embarrassed by the fact that your own university is based on the interview principle in terms of selecting your students? You have deprived schools of the interview techniques which you value so highly as a university.

(Professor Pring) First of all, I find it a privilege belonging to a university which supported me in my pursuit of comprehensive schools against all sorts of political opposition. May I also say, being a member of the Vice Chancellor's Working Party on Access, that I am very much aware of the enormous efforts being made within the university to widen access? The interview issue ...

It is just that when we were in the United States looking at higher education admissions policies and diversity, the elite universities on both east and west coasts said "We would use the interview system if there were more people like us". They do not use it.

(Professor Pring) Having sat through many debates on this, if there is no interview, how then do you begin to differentiate when you have to choose one out of three applications when everybody has three or four A levels. Unless you can find some other way of differentiating, I do not see that there is any other way.

Chairman: I am guilty of a total red herring there. We shall leave that.

Valerie Davey

Going back to my original question, Professor Tooley wanted to add something.

(Professor Tooley) I agree rather more with Professor Pring than Professor Gorard here. Stephen talked about the difficulties in terms of neighbourhood and therefore you have to bus children around and whatever the cost is in time and safety these factors have to come in. There is no alternative but to make sure that the full schools or educational places are good schools and you have to overcome those difficulties. My only difference with Richard is that he said you have to put in more resources and you have to have a top-down approach to improvement. I would suggest that the improvements should come from the bottom up through allowing parents to have demand and for educational entrepreneurs to respond to the demand which is there, therefore having vouchers in particularly difficult areas.

(Professor Gorard) The question you asked was about social inclusion, not whether the schools were good or not. I would disagree with both of the other commentators because the point is that if you want social inclusion you do have to mix up the intakes otherwise you are going to have large areas of social housing and the nearby school will have people from social housing. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but the social inclusion agenda would say you have to mix these people up so that whom you go to school with is not determined by how much you can afford to pay for your rent and for your house. That would be my point. I should also like to take issue with Richard Pring's point about the evidence for the damaging effects of choice. That is actually one of my areas of expertise. I have yet to see anything; it just does not exist. Unlike the question where I did not know the answer, that is a question where I do know the answer and there is none.

Jeff Ennis

Some of the main critics of the government's diversification agenda would say that we are in danger of creating a two-tier educational system. Given that is a factor we have to be aware of, how key is the role of the local education authority in making sure that does not happen?

(Professor Pring) One of the objections about the LEA system is the different levels of resources to schools which seem to have no justification other than the fact that they are in different geographical areas of the country. I saw some massive figures recently; a primary school child in one part of the country may be attracting about £1,000 less than a primary school child in another part of the country. Those are the extremes but it does not seem to me that rationally you can justify that any more. I believe this is being addressed. One needs a level ground for funding. One might say more funding for certain areas of the country where it is more expensive to attract teachers but that would be a rational way of approaching it. On the other hand at the same time the schools have to be responsive to local needs to some extent and once you isolate the control of schooling away from that locality, then you are not going to have that sensitivity to local needs. I am a great believer in maintaining local authority responsibilities for schools, albeit within that sort of national framework of funding and national framework of curriculum.

(Professor Tooley) The question was in order to avoid a two-tier educational system. My comments earlier would suggest that I think we already have a multi-tiered system and I am not in favour of monolithic systems, so I am not sure of the premise. What is the role of local authorities is the underlying issue. Based on the principle that competition can bring about good results and monopoly often brings about poor results, the local education authority is a local education monopoly and therefore would seem to be undesirable. I would not like to have to buy my food from a place under the local nutrition authority. Why would I want to get schooling from something which is monolithic?

So we ought to do away with the LEAs and not bother about things like home-to-school transport and overall admissions policies.

(Professor Tooley) There are certain functions there which Social Services could deal with.

Do you not think Social Services have enough problems to deal with?

(Professor Tooley) The 2002 Education Act talks about giving schools' governing bodies the ability to form companies to provide services which were otherwise provided by local education authorities. I support that wholeheartedly.

We have had one or two scandals, have we not, in the further education field because that was allowed to develop?

(Professor Tooley) Are we talking about further education now?

(Professor Gorard) We have done studies and in particular we looked at 61 LEAs and talked to the people and the schools involved in doing it and looked at their role. We have a hunch, and it cannot be as solid as some of the other things I have said which were based on very large scale data sets, that the lack of damage caused by increased market forces in this case, increased school choice, has been due to the buffering effect of the LEA. In many areas LEAs have worked to ameliorate problems which they saw arising as a result of competition, so they had actually worked as a useful intermediary in that effect. They have limitations in that they were largely, the ones we have spoken to at least, concerned to try to keep numbers healthy in schools. They were not particularly concerned with the actual composition of schools; in the hierarchy of needs that was higher up. Their first concern was with changing populations. Hounslow was one example where they have huge problems with influxes and outflows and so on to keep healthy numbers in schools. They have the buildings and teachers in the wrong place for the population. They has issues as soon as they try to change the catchment area or change something about admission procedures then the individual local councils who represent the local people squeal. It is very, very difficult for them to make any changes at all. They do have a role and I think their role has been largely beneficial in buffering potential damage caused by changes over time. They are kind of emasculated in what they do because of the nature of local councils.

Chairman

We had the impression when we visited Birmingham for a week and looked at their education system that they are a rather effective local education authority and the director there was Professor Tim Brighouse, one of your colleagues professionally. Have any of you done any work on what seemed to be a very much improved system of education, certainly in terms of results, in Birmingham?

(Professor Gorard) Our national data includes Birmingham, but it was not one of the local areas we looked at. We looked at three contiguous areas and that was not one of them.

(Professor Tooley) The key point is one which has been made already that local education authorities have very few powers at the moment, so you can have a very effective school system in spite of whatever the local authority is doing. I do not know about Birmingham, so I am not commenting but funding now is devolved 85 to 90 per cent to schools. Schools are pretty much in charge of their own budgets and affairs, local authorities are involved in school improvement services, transport has been mentioned and special needs, one or two other relatively minor things nowadays.

Jeff Ennis

Going back to something Professor Pring said earlier with which I totally agree, one thing which is making a difference in education in this country is the massive investment which this government has made into early years education and linking that into what I consider to be one of the main factors of underachievement which has also come out of this morning's discussion which is the poverty factor, I just wanted to ask Professor Pring and the other witnesses what value they feel SureStart will provide in secondary education in years to come. Is it a good investment for the future or is it just a waste of money?

(Professor Pring) I have to say I believe it is a good investment because my colleague Kathy Sylva, upon whose research a lot of it was based, is -

Chairman

She is a specialist adviser to this Committee.

(Professor Pring) I am glad I have said the right thing then. Putting that money in has been a great initiative and Kathy is really following this through very carefully with her own research. All the indications are, from talking to her - then they would, would they not? - that yes, it is paying dividends to a considerable extent.

(Professor Tooley) I came to talk about secondary education not early years but I am aware of the evidence of the equivalent programmes in the USA. Unfortunately it seems quite pessimistic that after very good initial starts the programmes have not carried on through.

You have been a bit reluctant to talk about the link which other academics talk about, this clear link between poverty and underachievement.

(Professor Tooley) Would I be reluctant?

You seem to be reluctant to address that subject. Professor Gorard in his research and Professor Pring in his comments this morning have emphasised this link clearly between poverty and underachievement. Listening to what you say, I am not quite sure how your view of how the system would change would benefit those people who have underachieved because they come from very poor backgrounds.

(Professor Tooley) I would hope that the evidence I gave in this document illustrates quite clearly that the type of voucher proposals are targeted at the poor and disadvantaged and succeed in raising achievement in those areas for the poor and disadvantaged. That is the key of the Milwaukee and Cleveland voucher experiments in evidence; it is also there in terms of the Swedish evidence and it is true in other areas as well. It is very much a concern of mine. Of course I have to agree with the evidence that poverty and low achievement often go together. That can be for a combination of factors. One of them could be in terms of poor schools.

(Professor Gorard) I am only speaking as a consumer of other people's research. I have great admiration for Kathy Sylva's work and I have an ex colleague who worked with her on that project. I have reservations about the long-term impact of these things based on two things. One is that you have already talked about international studies, the Pisa study and so on, but countries which are doing particularly well quite often have very late school starts compared with us. We do not know what the cause and effect is. The other issue is one of time frame. With certain time frames if you were going to work out what the impact of early years learning would have to be long term, we would have to have a long-term study. Kathy Silva has not been funded and I am not sure people would be prepared to wait, but the studies which James Tooley is referring to from the US suggest that they are a good thing for the short term, but that by the time people come to leave school, go to secondary school, the impact has dissipated.

Paul Holmes

May I explore one or two things Professor Tooley said earlier in a bit more detail? You agreed with the general statement my colleague made that schools should have equitable funding, or pupils should have. You said in your opening statement that private education was more cost effective. The average private pupil in Britain has two to three times as much spent on their education a year as the average state pupil and they also tend to select very much from higher social classes, they have far fewer children with special needs, they have far fewer children who qualify for free school meals. In what way then is the private sector in Britain more cost effective and equitable?

(Professor Tooley) Unfortunately there is no evidence in the studies here to refer to. You talked first about the amount of money which is spent on private versus public education. No-one knows what amount of money is spent on state education because you never factor in the capital costs of buildings, whereas those costs are always factored in to the private sector costs. The Centre for Policy Studies recently wrote a report which gave a much more comparable figure between state and private funding. That is the first point. The second point is that there are private schools within this country which are charging very low amounts and making surplus or profits. These are the schools one should look at to see the potential of the private sector, not the elitist private schools you are evidently referring to. The schools in the Girls' Day School Trust for instance operate on much lower things but are more or less comparable when you are including cost of capital to the equivalent state schools. CfTB has opened two schools, one in Medway where fees are £900 per term, £2,700 per year, considerably less than the equivalent cost of the state system; that includes cost of recurrent and capital and profit and the school seems to be very effective. There are no studies in this country. There are the studies in the US, the Coleman report, there are studies from around the world where these are compared. Unfortunately we do not have such a study here.

You have said that ideally you would like to see no state role in the provision of education at all, but in the real world you accept it is going to happen and you just want to minimise it as much as possible. There is a lot of evidence, for example statistics in a lot of the evidence which has been submitted by Professor Gorard and Professor Pring which show that basically you could argue private schools and grammar schools and faith schools and specialist schools are successful because they are selective in their various ways. Would you agree with that?

(Professor Tooley) Faith schools, specialist schools ...?

Private schools, grammar schools. They are basically more successful in academic terms because they select.

(Professor Tooley) There is no study comparing private schools in this country. Studies from elsewhere which compare are very careful to control for socio-economic status, cognitive ability; all the good studies control for that school choice process to allow for the fact that more educationally sophisticated parents would choose private schools. All those studies controlling for those things do not show what you have just said, but there is no comparable study here unfortunately.

So you disagree with all the evidence which has been submitted by your colleagues.

(Professor Tooley) It is not comparing private schools, is it? The evidence is showing what? The evidence is showing that specialist schools perform more highly because they select.

They select by a mixture of family background and ability.

(Professor Tooley) I am sorry, I thought we were talking about public versus private. I have no problem in agreeing that specialist schools either select by all sorts of means that they should not or surreptitiously select and that is not the issue between public and private, is it? They are state schools, state funded, state regulated, the state has imposed a specialist model on them and they are doing what they are doing.

(Professor Pring) Could I just correct one assumption of the question which was that grammar schools are more successful than the other schools. The evidence coming from Jesson's work is that the grammar school equivalent in a fully comprehensive system will actually do marginally better than those in the grammar school system, which is a very, very surprising kind of result. The other thing to do with that is that the grammar school system as a whole will actually disadvantage many other people more. Just that particular cohort do not do better in the grammar school than they do in a fully non-selective system of education.

(Professor Tooley) This is something I have not touched on. Lots has been said about the comprehensives and you normally have comprehensive schools versus selective ones in terms of grammar/secondary modern divide. If you go back to the 1980 study by James Steadman, the national child development study, it did not show a superiority of the comprehensive system and then you had a much fairer comparison back in the 1980 study because you had probably 60 per cent comprehensives, 40 per cent selective system when the study was going on. It did not show the superiority of the comprehensive system, it did not show that the children with the highest self-esteem were those in the secondary moderns, the children who enjoyed school the most were in the secondary moderns, the children with the lowest self-esteem were in the grammar schools, children who were least altruistic wanted to work for others were in the comprehensive schools etcetera. There were various factors in that. I have let it pass that the comprehensive ideal is superior to the selective system. My only objective to the selective system is that it was imposed by government. As a victim of comprehensive schools myself, I would not want to impose them on anyone else.

You have said that you would like to see the whole education system open up much more to parental choice. The current government are doing that through things like specialist schools, faith schools, colleges, city academies and all the rest of it. You have said you would like to do it through a voucher system to give the parents the choice. A lot of critics of either the voucher system or the current government system would argue that all that means is that most supportive, mobile and aspirational parents select their kids into the better schools, however they are defined and that must therefore have a negative effect on the other schools around them. Presumably you would argue that in fact those better schools will then act as a beacon which pulls up the weaker schools.

(Professor Tooley) That is exactly what I would argue and I do argue in this paper, do I not? I took the evidence from the Florida system and the Swedish system in particular and these are particularly relevant here where the higher the proportion of students in private schools under the Swedish system and, again controlling for all the factors which Stephen would want to see controlled for, the higher the achievement in the state schools, in other words where children had not been selected by their parents to go to private schools. That is the assumption backed by the evidence that competition will improve standards for all, even those who are left behind. The assumption is often made that somehow there is this disaffected bunch of parents who will not choose. Often that is just an assumption. Often it is just a matter of very bad research and the research which Stephen has criticised in many places, which I support, very bad research we say, which comes up with that conclusion. Often it is just an assumption which has unfortunately no counter facts. We do not know what would happen in giving all parents, including those bad parents in deprived areas, real choice. If the evidence from Sweden and Florida amongst others is anything to go by, it should have a beneficial effect.

As somebody who worked in education for 22 years, I would say from that experience that it is fairly self-evident that an elite school, however defined, in an area inevitably creams off the better pupils and the more supportive families and therefore has a negative effect on the surrounding schools. I would say that logical experience dictates that. There are statistical surveys which show, for example, counties with grammar school systems still. They may do well in the top one third, but if you look at the academic performance of the whole range of pupils, they are doing less well for the whole range of children within that local education authority area. Is there not evidence as well as logic which would say that the better schools are going to cream off and therefore have a negative effect on the surrounding schools?

(Professor Tooley) The empirical evidence you referred to has a system without real choice, so that may well have a negative effect. As I said, I do not want a state-imposed 11-plus system, I think that is a bad thing. Real choice would not necessarily have that impact, so I would dispute the empirical evidence. The logical argument is that if you have all parents able to make choices, first of all more will exercise choice than logically speaking and schools will respond, educational entrepreneurs if you like will respond to that demand which is expressed through, let us call it the voucher. You will make it attractive for high quality education suppliers to come in and provide high quality schools where perhaps there are none. The evidence of the company like Edison Schools, and I know Edison Schools in America is having trouble with its stock at the moment, but we still have the history of Edison over the last five or six years where it goes into deprived areas with a brand name investing $1.7 million on average into each school it takes over and creating, by all accounts, a better environment and by many accounts higher outcomes, certainly more parental satisfaction. Those sorts of schools could be there in the deprived areas we are talking about if there were the mechanisms to allow parents to express their preference.

Just on that one, could you not argue that equally shows that the answer is to pour $1.7 million into a deprived school rather than to put in private management or parental choice?

(Professor Tooley) Yes, if you could persuade Gordon Brown to put that sort of money into each school, then good luck to you. But you cannot. You will not be able to do that, but you can persuade a company like Edison to do that if the returns and everything are worked out correctly.

(Professor Gorard) We are moving away from the private/public thing. I want to distance myself. I also want to agree with James Tooley on this one issue but there is a much simpler reason for it. You say it is obvious, and you have worked in education for many years, that more privileged parents and families will have an advantage in a choice system, which I am not disputing. Part of the reason why I, having worked as a secondary school teacher for most of my professional life, was really astounded by our findings was that the choice post-1988 in particular did not appear to have the impact we suspected. What I realise, looking at that again, is that what we always ignore is the status ante, what happened before. There is a kind of imagination that somehow these parents are not having an advantaged schools system, are not in choice, these are the people who can afford selection by mortgage, they can afford to buy into these areas. What the evidence appears to say is that although presumably they are going to have an advantage under whatever system you would like to devise, the advantage they have under a system of choice appears to be slightly less than when it is simply based on education by area of residence, given the nature of the current housing we have, going back to a point I made earlier. When I talk about choice I am talking simply about the freedom to express a preference and apply subscription criteria by schools and LEAs. I am not talking about the diversification you were talking about. You have effectively a range of similar looking schools and people are voting and saying they would like to go to that one please.

(Professor Pring) The part of the country where there is the greatest amount of choice, so-called, is Kent, where there is every conceivable type of education establishment and where they have by far the greatest number of failing schools. There is fairly good evidence that it works to the advantage of some and to the disadvantage of those we ought to be most concerned about. I am rather surprised that James mentioned the Edison project. I know that. I did go and see Schmidt who was in charge of it, had lunch with him not long ago at the tennis club in New York, went to visit some of his schools and so on. The incredible thing is that the whole thing depended upon cutting costs and doing all sorts of things and now we are seeing the consequences of that where they are now in grave trouble and where the whole charter school movement is now under severe criticism in the United States. Those are the two points I should like to put in.

Ms Munn

None of you seems to have had anything good to say about specialist schools and I just want to reflect upon our experience in Birmingham where among the schools we went to I certainly went to two schools which were specialist, one in performing arts and one in technology, both continuing to draw their pupils from the areas they had drawn them from before they became specialist, which were effectively white working class areas and both of whom were actually very positive about the process, in that they felt in addition to getting financial resources in, they had also, through the process of applying to be granted specialist status, had groups of staff focused on the key issues, what they needed to achieve in having a greater structure. In talking to some of the pupils, particularly at the one on performing arts, they were saying a key difference was, as one said, that her mum now wanted to come to school and kept asking when she could come up because she is coming to things which are more accessible in terms of performing arts. This has had the knock-on effect of getting her more interested in her daughter's education and feeling that the school is more accessible than it was. Given that starting with a blank piece of paper is not an option, given that we are where we are, given that there are all these children going through school now, is there not something to be said for this process which not only injects additional money into it, but does it on the basis that schools have focused on improving, is there not something to be said for specialist schools?

(Professor Pring) The work from Schagen at the London Institute would say that there is actually very little curriculum change from specialist schools to non-specialist schools, despite the fact that they say "I'm a specialist" in whatever it is. For every specialist school you can see which really does make an effort in one particular direction and where parents say they really want to go up to the school now, I could say the same for other well-run schools which are non-specialist schools. The question is with specialist schools first of all that they do have the powers to recruit on the basis of aptitude and aptitude seems to me an even more difficult thing to measure than the old intelligence tests which I do not think anyone now would subscribe to as a way of differentiating young people at the age of eleven in terms of eligibility. Therefore the question is this: on what grounds could you select according to aptitude? I have not seen anything which has those sorts of tests.

They are not. None of these schools was doing that. My point is not that. This process seemed to be now making a difference to those kids. What is wrong with that is what I am asking?

(Professor Pring) There is nothing wrong with that if it is making a difference. What I am saying is that the same process can carry on in a school without the extra funding and without actually the powers to recruit according to aptitude. That is all.

(Professor Gorard) I have no problem with what you said except the usual caveat that the plural of anecdotes is not informational data. I do not know how you chose the school you went to see in Birmingham or who chose it for you. Clearly there will be good schools in any system and there will be non-specialist schools which we could take you to and the enthusiasm of teachers and the quality of work going on would astound us. The fact that a school has these characteristics and also has the characteristic of being specialist does not mean that they will all be like that. I have been into schools and I have been astounded over the magic white boards, the enthusiasm and ethos there. What I have to warn myself about as a social scientist is allowing that experience of an individual school or a couple of schools to override the knowledge you can get from the larger picture which is what is actually happening. All the specialist schools claim they are still quoting pretty much the same thing, but the annual census returns are not showing that. They are diverging from the LEAs to some extent. They might still look the same, but the micro-data is showing us that they are becoming distinct in terms of fiscal means.

We are talking about schools which have relatively recently gone through this process which is perhaps not open to study by you. What was striking about it - and this was two schools and I am referring to Birmingham because it was something we did as a Committee but it is also reflected within schools in my own constituency who have specialist status - was that what they were saying was that process of going through, looking at becoming a specialist school, has helped them focus on what school is about, about teaching and learning and all the things which make a good school. I entirely take the point it does not have to be a specialist school which does it, but if it is a mechanism which starts to show and makes a difference to schools, what is wrong with it?

(Professor Pring) May I ask whether the process did include the extra four per cent in terms of capitation which might also have had to do with enabling them to do it?

I am not saying the money investment was not welcome. One of the things a headteacher at a school in my own constituency said was "If you give me more money it gives me more flexibility, we get more staff, I can do better". That is important but we are actually talking about the process of applying which involves them in focusing on what they as a school are doing and what they are trying to achieve. What the teacher was saying was that that was the most productive and the most helpful bit about that. Maybe you can do it through another process, but if specialist schools are enabling schools to do that, what is wrong with it?

(Professor Gorard) It goes back to a point I made earlier in the context of looking at these things as things in their own right, sui generis. There is a danger that we quickly say we want specialist schools because specialism is a good thing and then we revert to your argument which is that it does not really matter that it is specialism, it could be something else, but the kick it gives the school and the enthusiasm it generates is a post hoc argument for ending up doing what we have been doing. You could argue from the Hawthorn-type study that anything you did might have had that affect, whether it be making them foundation schools or giving them a religious ethos. Are you arguing something specific about the idea of specialist schools or is it simply about focusing attention on specialist schools and trying to make them improve?

Ms Munn: What I am arguing, which is what the then Secretary of State was very much saying, is that it was a mechanism and by doing that it enabled these things to happen. I would not dismiss the importance of money because what we know about reform in public services generally is that it is not easy to reform if you are investing at the same time. Reform without investment tends to be viewed very negatively and therefore there is less likelihood of success.

Chairman

Professor Gorard, when we started this conversation this morning I thought you were saying very clearly that the only way to judge a school is not just by the results children get in terms of being qualified or unqualified when they leave school.

(Professor Gorard) I said it was a difficult comparison to make, particularly internationally.

It is a difficult comparison to make. What I think Meg Munn is saying is that she could see at some of the specialist schools we visited a real change in the kind of quality of the environment which pupils and staff are enjoying.

(Professor Gorard) I am sure that is correct. What I am saying is that you cannot therefore read off and say if you make all schools like this, the same will happen in all schools. You go to a school and you see it is a particularly good or exciting school, it has had this recent change. It could be that a different kind of change might have produced the same effect, or the school might always have been like that and that is why it was chosen or put itself forward to be a specialist school. You cannot simply look at an anecdote like that. You have to look at the bigger picture.

The bigger picture for you is just the dry old statistics of how many GCSEs everyone got.

(Professor Gorard) No, it is not. I am primarily concerned with the composition of the school, going back to the social inclusion point.

But without any relationship to the achievement of those schools.

(Professor Gorard) No. I have also looked at the statistics of achievement.

Professor Tooley, you just celebrate the diversity which Meg Munn is describing on our visits.

(Professor Tooley) No, I would agree totally with Stephen and Richard on this. The top-down initiatives which are unfair in terms of funding create something which of course is likely to be better, but you could have done that through many other means. The crucial point is that they are not a panacea, are they? You cannot have every school a specialist school with that extra degree of funding. Perhaps you can, but what is wrong with the idea of a specialist school for those people who are generalists?

Mr Chaytor

May I just pursue the specialist school concept for a moment? How many specialist schools do you think we would have if they did not attract half a million pounds of extra funding?

(Professor Gorard) I do not know. I am guessing fewer. A factorial analogy, a similar thing - and I apologise for going back to Wales here - as I explained is the similarity with Welsh-medium education in Wales, this is the designated Welsh-medium schools in areas where the majority of the population are English speaking. They had great similarity. They got differential funding to start up and the LEAs allowed pupils, say in an area like Cardiff because they could not fill the schools from a local catchment area, free transport across the city or even across LEA boundaries to fill the school. What they discovered of course was that their league table was up for GCSEs and all the other indicators were very good in comparison with other local schools. What immediately happened was that people, very esteemed academics and policymakers, were saying they could learn from these schools, there was an enthusiasm about them - and there was - there was a missionary zeal about the school and the people who taught in them. They said they could roll out whatever it was they had into other local English-medium comprehensives. Of course it does not work and the stuff that Schagen has done about the school improvement, the ethos in the specialist schools, would have the same effect if rolled out to other groups. If you take away the funding and you take away that kind of excitement and the ability to vary your admission arrangements and simply time intervening, my hunch is that very few people would be voting to go for it.

On the evidence of performance, how do you relate the evidence that Schagen has produced, most recently on the back of the national value-added data a few weeks ago, to the claims by the Chairman of the Technology Trust who always quotes this differential figure of GCSE achievement and this of course appeared in the White Paper? How do you relate these two things?

(Professor Gorard) Schagen is saying there is marginal difference between specialist and non-specialist, that the GCSE differential simply does not exist. Several snapshot studies have been taken. Schagen is one, Rosalind Levorchic[?] from the Jewish Education Bureau is another, David Jesson's own independent work has done that. What they all found, in contextualised value added approaches, using slightly different data sets and different techniques, was a slight - couple of grade points - advantage for specialist schools; they appear to be doing better than their neighbours. That is why I should like to go back to that four point data issue. At any point you could take a group of schools and see that they perhaps appeared to be doing better with the group of pupils they had. However, going back to the point about social inclusion, if who you go to school with has an effect, then concentrating pupils of a particular kind in a particular school you might get what some call a halo effect or other kind of effect so you would have to factor that out. What I have done is simply take the specialist schools which David Jesson has included in his studies, how they were performing before they became specialist schools in 1994-95 and up to 2000, all the other schools in the country which are still non-specialist of every kind - and you can exclude, as they did, the selective schools - and then look at how they are doing now. If you look at the proportion the non-specialist schools have improved slightly more than the specialist but the differences are minor because over time they are all improving.

In terms of the performance of the specialist schools, do you detect any difference in the earlier batch of specialist schools as against the most recent batch?

(Professor Gorard) Certainly in terms of their transposition, because of course they are the ones which are more likely. Originally it was only four MGM and VA/VC schools. Obviously their composition is different and therefore their raw scores are different. I would take issue with the thing in the Jesson and Taylor report about how the earlier they became specialist the greater the difference. All they are doing is subtracting the score, say GCSE 5 A Star to C in the year the school became specialist, from the current score. So if 2001 is the year and the first batch is 1994 they are saying the difference between the scores in those years since 1994 is bigger than for those schools which became specialists in 1995, subtracting the 1995 from the 2001. As you will know from every August every year the GCSE scores are going up by and large, for whatever reason. We could have another session discussing why that is happening. Therefore you have to factor that increase in. If you take that out, there is no difference. The further you go back in time, the bigger the difference between any school, specialist or otherwise, now and the school then.

You are saying the government's White Paper was based on flawed research.

(Professor Gorard) Flawed evidence. There are all sorts of things. They took out selective schools from both the specialist and non-specialist. So you had specialist schools being compared with what they called the non-selective other non-specialist schools. They took out the grammar schools and the LEA-retained grammar schools, but they kept the secondary modern schools and said they were non-selective because they are selected because they contain the group which could not or did not want to go to the grammar school. You have to take them out of the equation as well and if you do that the differential disappears.

May I switch tack a little bit and turn to Professor Tooley? Parent A lives in a rural area with only one school. Parent B lives in an urban area with many schools but cannot afford the transport costs to go beyond the local school. Parent C has a Volvo. Which parent gains most from your voucher system?

(Professor Tooley) It has an effect somewhat similar to the choice system and what Stephen's work illustrates is that the disadvantaged parents are not increasingly disadvantaged.

What is the use of the voucher to the parent in the rural area?

(Professor Tooley) I live in a rural area and to jump to an analogy or metaphor - perhaps not extremely helpful - I do my shopping at an international chain supermarket. The quality of that supermarket in Morpeth is exactly the same as the quality of the supermarket in Newcastle or in London or wherever. The thing about when you have a market system is that you do get chains of schools developing - the Edison schools example is one - where there are uniform standards and it is the competition at national or indeed the international level to keep standards high and not in my case the competition in the town of Morpeth.

Earlier you were saying that your argument against monopoly provision was one of uniformity and now you are arguing that uniformity is a virtue in a market based system.

(Professor Tooley) No, I was quite clear that diversity was not necessarily a virtue of the market system. The point I am trying to make is that competition can still work if you have national competitors. For example, if there were, as there are in Sweden, the three chains of schools which have emerged because of the voucher system, national changes in Sweden, if I am a rural parent and my local school belongs to one of those national chains, that national chain is competing nationally and its standards in that local community must be as high as anywhere else, otherwise, as is the normal things with chains, its brands will be ruined. Competition can work at the national level even if in my own place there is not that competition there. That can also apply to the person with the Volvo who will always benefit, if by a person with a Volvo you mean a certain type of person. As Stephen pointed out, those people always benefit.

I am speaking as a person with a Volvo here, be careful what you say. Can you have a market based system which does not increase inequality?

(Professor Tooley) Yes.

What is the essential ingredient that delivers the equality you are arguing for? Is it the structure of ownership? Is it the change of admissions policy or is it changing curriculum? What is the ingredient? You seem to be saying it is simply the fact of private ownership which will deliver equality.

(Professor Tooley) It is the fact of competition. This is an interpretation of the statistics and the Swedish evidence is very interesting here because that does show exactly what you said, a market system. The only universal voucher system in the western world does have the impact of raising standards for all including those left behind in the state system. The evidence is there and the interpretation is that it is competition which does that. If it affects a school through financial means, whether it has parents sending their children there or not, then it will respond to keep standards high to attract parents.

Since 1988 we have had competition between every school in the country within each local authority area.

(Professor Tooley) This is Stephen's area of expertise. I would only report his research. His research shows this is not having a detrimental impact on the lowest socio-economic groups.

(Professor Gorard) There is a relatively simple answer to your question. Your question was: what is the characteristic of the market, what is it you have which will work so it does not actually increase inequality? Is that correct? My view is that it goes back to what the situation was like before. I am sure there are things you can tweak in the actual policy, but for me the key thing is the situation you are replacing with the introduction of choice. When for example, apartheid was abolished in South Africa and the idea of separate white and black universities was abolished and greater choice was included, there was less ethnic segregation in universities as a result of choice. I guess if you had the opposite, and I am not sure we have ever had a situation where we have a school or education system which was perfectly distributed in terms of social justice, and then you allowed in a market or choice system, you would probably move it towards inequality. The study we have done, because we had inequality in the system pre-1988, 1987 and so on, shows the policies seem to be driving us in the right direction towards greater equality, but you cannot then push it to its limit and say we have to keep doing that. There must come a point which we may have reached already where there are no more returns from choice.

Could I ask both of you to respond briefly to the OECD survey which came out yesterday, which is based on the Pisa returns and which concludes that the OECD countries which have the most differentiated systems of education actually have lower levels of achievement. This was flagged up in the Pisa report last December but yesterday is a specific follow-on to that.

(Professor Gorard) I go back to the point I made earlier. I find it very difficult to give it much credit. The OECD does a great job. It is very difficult to draw comparisons which we would deem policy-relevant from international comparisons.

So at that macro level you think the conclusions cannot be drawn.

(Professor Gorard) It is extremely difficult to make comparisons. It is easy to read too much into that kind of thing.

If it is the case, which I think it is, that there are more young people in Anglican schools and Catholic schools Monday to Friday, than there are in Anglican churches and Catholic churches on Sunday, what do you conclude about the admissions policies of those schools?

(Professor Pring) These schools do have the power to interview parents. The interesting thing about Catholic schools, which I know quite well and the same thing is happening in Oxford at the moment, is that in many, many cases they have more places than there are actual practising Roman Catholics around and therefore they need to fill these places. They will fill them with people who express sympathies, as it were, for their particular beliefs and their particular practices.

Fellow travellers.

(Professor Pring) Yes. Having just been in dispute with the Archbishop of Birmingham on precisely this point, I would not want to use those words, but nonetheless there is an admissions policy in these schools which will accept people who themselves are not practising subscribers to that faith. That enables them then to differentiate between people and therefore exclude some of those people who may be least supportive of what the school is for and indeed in terms of the general academic achievement. This is something there is now quite a lot of evidence for.

(Professor Tooley) I defer to Stephen in terms of international comparisons and I have not read yesterday's report. The December report, if I recall, said Germany came out particularly badly and the differentiated systems were the state imposed 11-plus, as they have in Germany, with children going to grammar schools, vocational, modern schools at age 11, imposed by the government, implemented through the Länder. It was not that they performed more badly, in my understanding, it was that the gap between the better and the worse was greater than anywhere else. It is not that their overall standards are necessarily worse. The criticism is not about differentiation, but about a particular sort of state imposed differentiation, the sort we got rid of many years ago.

Mr Simmonds

May I dig a little further into the parental choice issue? May I ask all three of you whether you feel there is meaningful parental choice in the secondary school sector in this country at the moment? Secondly, will increased parental choice both increase educational attainment and reduce the disparity of attainment which some of you mentioned earlier?

(Professor Pring) One has to balance parental choice for their own particular children against the good of the community as a whole. I do think that schools are responsible to parents but they are responsible to the wider community. There may be particular advantages for certain parents being able to make these choices. This all adds up to less good for the community as a whole and I think that schools have to get that very difficult balance. It is very difficult politically to get that kind of balance. The other point I should like to make is that such choice as exists is open to certain people and not to others and there is evidence on that. One sees, particularly in the inner city areas, particularly in London and the work which has recently been published in the Journal of Policy Studies, an enormous movement away from the local school in certain parts of London and not in others. I do not want to name particular schools here, but there is quite clearly one school where I once used to teach in London where you have a massive disproportion now of young people who get very low GCSEs, who come from particular backgrounds and families, where those who are able to exercise choice have moved away to other schools which have a greater attraction. The choice is there for all parents in certain areas and not there for many parents in other areas. It is a very, very different sort of scene right across the country.

(Professor Gorard) The answer of course is that in many areas, not for many people but many areas, there is no choice. I am talking about rural areas. A lot of the policies which come out of Westminster appear to people in Northumbria or Pembrokshire to be an attempt to solve a problem which is in London in a London way or possibly a Birmingham problem in a Birmingham way. There are areas of the country where, if you do not go to your nearest school you have a 40-mile journey to go to your next nearest school, which is just impossible. There are also ways in which whatever the policy, whatever the law says, it is enacted at a lower level in very, very different ways in different LEAs across the country. There are even one or two LEAs - and I am clearly not going to name them - we believed in our study were simply breaking the law. They did not agree with the notion of choice and they did not give parents any. In a mild way, there are huge differences in the way the forms are presented to parents. Some LEAs write to say, "This is the school you have got. If you really, really want not to go to that school you can do this, you can fill in this form". Others say, "Here is the range of schools you are eligible for but you could also go to other LEAs. Tell us what you want and we shall put it on a plate for you". There are huge variations depending where you live in terms of how much apparent choice you have. Then there is the issue of planned admission numbers which limit the numbers in each school. You are not getting a choice, all you can do is express a preference. Whether you achieve that choice and the number of people achieving that choice depends on the number of surplus places in the area where you are living. Huge discrepancies.

Chairman

In your memorandum to the Committee you say 90 per cent of people get their first choice.

(Professor Gorard) They get their first expressed choice. What we do not know is to what extent people are learning to play a system and express a choice which might not be their first one. We do not have the data on that. Yes, it looks to be working and that people get their expressed choice because in many cases people do not have a choice.

(Professor Pring) Ten per cent who do not is a very large number.

Absolutely. I was trying to draw the figures out. I was not approving the figures.

(Professor Gorard) You have to compare that again with the status quo ante. How many people would have been unhappy with the choice they would have been allocated if they had not been given the choice. My hunch is that it would be many more than 10 per cent.

(Professor Tooley) Going back again to the status quo ante 1980 where parental choice was almost non-existent and the only way was by appealing through Section 8 of the 1944 Act, since then there is now a great deal of meaningful parental choice. Does it go far enough is the implication? No, for the reasons the others have given and currently only the well-off can have the choice of private schools but I would want to see everyone in that situation, able to have that sort of choice as well through the voucher system I proposed.

May I push all three of you on the second element of my question? Do you think there is a causal link between parental choice and raising educational attainment and standards?

(Professor Pring) I shall give my answer here which is not based on evidence I can clearly quote. I would say very little or none.

(Professor Gorard) I have a paper which directly addressed that question and the answer is a definite we cannot really tell.

(Professor Tooley) Like my colleagues I should like to sit on the fence. We do not know for certain but the evidence is suggestive, is it not? The evidence I give in this paper suggests that parental choice is one of the factors in raising standards in schools. We talk about empirical versus logical. The logical thing there must surely be that by giving parents the power to choose, giving them responsibility over education this will have a beneficial effect. It was first pointed out as far as I am concerned by Lady Plowden in her 1967 report that this would be a very good and beneficial thing. Unfortunately she proposed no changes to the 1944 Act: it took the Thatcher government to do that. I can see logically it would seem to have a beneficial effect. The evidence seems to suggest that when it is incorporated in other factors it seems to have an effect but of course we do not know.

Jonathan Shaw

Professor Tooley, the Pisa study from our recollection showed that the distinguishing feature of Germany, the US, New Zealand and the UK was that they had a large tailend of underachievement and they are the countries with the most diverse structures. Germany, the US, New Zealand and the United Kingdom had a disproportionately large tailend, whereas in Finland, which has the least diverse structure, if you are a white working class boy you are more likely to achieve your full potential than in one of those four countries.

(Professor Tooley) I disagree with your premise.

That is what the stats showed us.

(Professor Tooley) Netherlands has a much more diverse system. It depends how you define "diverse". The German system is diverse in a top-down way that all schools must select at age 11 on academic ability. That is the German system. Our systems are diverse in a different sort of way. The Dutch system is much more diverse in terms of types of schools. The Danish system is much more diverse in terms of the types of schools. I disagree with the way you have defined the diverse systems.

Paul Holmes

Like Jonathan I have heard Barry McGraw from OECD talk twice about the Pisa study. He is absolutely categoric in what he says which is what came out in the report yesterday. He says that the countries with the most selective systems, selective in various ways, and he singles out Germany with grammar schools, he singles out the USA and he singles out Britain in particular, those three countries with the most selective systems have this large tail of underachievement. He says that if you look at the results for the able kids they are right up at the top there, but when you factor in all the children you come down to still above average internationally but much closer to average. We should still be average because we are three of the wealthiest countries in the world and we have heard that socio-economic practice is the key determinant, but he is quite clear that selective systems of various kinds lead to the greatest inequality of outcome and the largest tails of underachievement.

(Professor Tooley) I am not using the Pisa study as a good example because of doubts similar to Stephen's about these international comparisons. I do not know why Barry McGraw is defining these systems as the most diverse and differentiated. How can you ignore a system where in the Netherlands any group of parents can start a school and 70 per cent of children attend these private schools. How can you say that is not much good?

He said explicitly "selective". Selective might be by 11-plus, it might be by socio-economic practice, it might be by vouchers, it might be by specialist schools, all those examples.

(Professor Tooley) So the German system is definitely selective. How is the system in England and Wales selective? Without hearing the discussion I do not know how he got to that conclusion, but I am just offering these alternative suggestions that they are far more differentiated and diverse systems.

Just to add to that he goes on to say that the two most successful countries he would point to from all the statistical research are Finland, which has introduced a completely comprehensive system quite deliberately, and the one which is racing up the ladder, though it is not at the top yet because it is a developing country effectively, is Korea which introduced a completely comprehensive system.

(Professor Tooley) Where is the Netherlands?

Mr Chaytor

What is the difference between parental choice and parental preference?

(Professor Gorard) Do you mean as I expressed it?

As two concepts. Which do we really have in this country?

(Professor Gorard) We have parental preference.

So we do not have parental choice.

(Professor Gorard) Not really.

What would we need to have to have parental choice?

(Professor Gorard) You would have to guarantee people places in the school they chose. You would have to allow schools to expand and presumably they would reach some sort of optimal level before people started moving elsewhere. You would probably be carting Portakabins up and down motorways if you were going to do that. You would have to get rid of the archaic planned admission numbers, would you not, and you would have to develop resources to the schools which were oversubscribed?

Choice is the ability to implement your preference.

(Professor Gorard) I would have thought so, yes.

Politically and financially, is it possible to give parental choice?

(Professor Gorard) I come back again to the point made by John Baron. There comes a point at which you have to cut off. I do not know where that would be. Clearly you could not have unfettered choice. We could probably do more than now.

Chairman: We saw some examples of parental choice in Birmingham, for example the largest girls' school in Europe, we were told, was on one side of the city and had an enormous transportation problem of families travelling round the road system to attend this school. It just seemed to me that the environmental and other implications of that sort of travel were frightening to behold.

Jonathan Shaw

Professor Gorard, you said that perhaps there is not enough diversity in terms of allowing regional variations. You said that the government's concentration on trying to get the system right is predominantly an urban focus and you mentioned London. Would you advocate allowing regional variations? Perhaps we need different diversities for different areas rather than all the schools across England having to have one-size-fits-all. Does that make sense?

(Professor Gorard) Yes, it does and I guess it is the logical conclusion of what I am saying, but it was not one I had expressed previously. I guess some form of differences between different regions depending on needs but it is the geography underlying that.

That would be a job for whom? A local education authority:

(Professor Gorard) Devolved government. I do not know.

Chairman

We have had a very long session and you may think we have asked a strange range of diverse questions but may I ask whether there are any questions we should have asked you which you would like to comment on?

(Professor Pring) You can have different sorts of selection but the one thing which is crucial for high quality education is high quality teachers, both being able to attract them and then having attracted them to retain them. You could have all the system changes in the world, you could have all the resources in, but unless you foster the teaching profession and get intelligent, dedicated people who are going to find professional satisfaction over a 40-year period in being teachers, then all the things we have been talking about are worth sweet damn all quite frankly. I am delighted that you are going to have a select committee on that, but you really have to link these two things together and not see them as separate. One of the fascinating things, with all due respect, is that none of your questions had anything to do at all with the quality of teaching.

(Professor Gorard) I would just reiterate the point: beware of advocates of particular approaches. You have to look at the evidence very, very carefully. May I just make two comments on two points I made? We did not really get back to the point about standards. We could have a discussion or I could communicate with you later if you wanted. The problem you have is the coincidence of the rise post-1986 and GCSE, particularly in criterion referencing, allowed us to increase grades, performance of schools as measured by exams year on year with the introduction of school choice and cutting between that. It seems to me that what we need is more clearly policy-informed research directed at asking specific questions like that and I am afraid it would have to be experimental. You would have to bite the bullet of the practical cost and the ethical issues involved. If you want to know answers to questions like that, then you are going to have to run experiments in particular parts of the country. I am not advocating that. I am saying that if those are the questions you need to answer, I do not think the kind of dredging through the tea leaves approach to research is actually going to generate the definitive answer you would want to put lots and lots of public money into. Coming back to Paul Holmes' point about the Pisa study, I am doing some work on the Pisa study with colleagues, primarily concentrating on all the EU countries and looking at the issues of equity in relation to the structure of the school system including the nature of selection. We have not got very far; we are about half way through. If you want to keep in touch with that, it might give some insights into the questions you were asking.

(Professor Tooley) In answer to that question on whether there was anything else you should have asked, I have actually been incredibly impressed with the range and depth of the questions. I thought we would be skating at a much more superficial level than this. I think there is nothing which you have not covered. In terms of a summary, diversity of provision when focused on top-down initiatives is the wrong way to be looking at things. Diversity of provision is allowing diversity to be expressed through bottom-up initiatives and diversity may or may not be the outcome in the end.

Chairman: Thank you again; thanks all of you. We very much appreciate the time you have given us, the quality of the answers you have provided. We have not pursued some avenues such as teacher quality because that is the number three part of the inquiry and we may well have you back. The fact of the matter is that we are trying to get a sense of where we are going in terms of the first part of the look at secondary education and that was diversity. We have learned a great deal, this was very important first session. We have now encircled the problem, we are now getting our bearings as we go forward and we are at our boldest when we are at our bravest. Thank you very much for your attendance. That was an excellent session.