Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-35)
TUESDAY 25 FEBRUARY 2003
MR NEIL
DAVIES, MRS
JUDITH BENNETT
AND MRS
SARAH LYSTER
20. The letters have been addressed to head
teachers and school governors.
(Mr Davies) You said "teachers". At that
meeting I asked him to point out to the Chancellor that if he
should give money out, then it is to the governors, and not to
the head teachers, as he did in the budget, which can create huge
problems for us.
21. Lots of governors do tend to defer to the
head teacher in allocation.
(Mr Davies) Over a certain amount. Under a certain
amount the head teacher has a free rein, but over a certain amount
it is down to the governing body to decide.
(Mrs Lyster) I endorse it. It is an issue that the
local authority has spent a lot of time working on, identifying
why some schools are keeping such enormous budgets, and there
are other schools that manage to keep themselves to an exact level.
It seems that in general with small schools, the reason for keeping
big budgets is because they have old buildings, and they are worried
about costs of heating breaking down and large repair bills. That
is one of the main reasons for holding on to large balances. It
is very difficult to justify—
22. It is an insurance policy, in effect.
(Mrs Lyster) Yes. I have to say that I do not approve
of it because I think that money that has been allocated should
be spent on the children that are going through the school at
the time and not being kept for other purposes. It is a difficult
issue, though.
(Mr Davies) From memory, there is to be no more than
5% spent on—
23. I asked the Secretary of State for a list
by county, and in some counties the balances are up to 8/9 per
cent.
(Mr Davies) There is another thing that needs to be
taken into account apart from heating and things like that. You
might purposely build up an underspend if you know that you are
going to have some capital expenditure in the future. I am from
an inner city school, but we poll from all over the city and we
have areas of deprivation that we poll from. We had our school
re-glazed, and the glaziers brought in huge panes of glass; and
there was one safety stamp on that pane of glass. They cut it
on site and re-glazed the building. When we had the health and
safety inspection, they said, "you have not got a stamp on
each pane of glass; you need to re-glaze the building." We
said: "Sorry, we have done it and we have spent a fortune"
but they said we had to do it. So we had to build up an underspend
that, on the balance sheet, looks wrong, but it was earmarked.
I am not saying this is always the case but there are genuine
reasons for some underspend; but equally, there are some where
they have just not managed to budget as well as perhaps they could.
Mr Curry: How many unfilled governors' posts
are there? The reason I ask the question is that in my constituency
there is a problem to get people to serve as governors, because
the demands upon governors have increased. The reason I ask the
question is because in my constituency there is a problem in getting
people to serve as governors because the demands upon them and
their legal obligations have increased. I could probably write
out a list of schools that have places for governors that they
cannot fill.
Chairman
24. Is the problem greater in rural areas than
in urban areas in filling a board of governors? We are obviously
looking at some of the things you have talked about that we find
are also problems in urban areas. But is there more of a community
spirit to get involved in the heart of the community, which is
often the school, in rural areas? Do we have any feel for this?
(Mr Davies) In the inner city, we have got 3% vacancy—unitary
authority. We carry in Portsmouth, which is a unitary authority,
1,060 governors.
25. Is it higher or lower in rural areas?
(Mrs Bennett) I would say that there is not a great
deal of difference. I would think that the difference is between
primary and secondary is that it is much harder to get secondary
governors than primary governors. It is easier perhaps if you
are a village of a reasonable size. We are lucky; our village
has 3000 people, so we are on the generous side. People have a
community interest. From talking to other colleagues across the
county, this is true in the urban areas as well; there is an interest
in the local primary school, but the secondary school sometimes
has the problem—quite often with the LEA appointees—and
that has something to do with the somewhat strange way they go
about sorting out their LEA governors.
(Mrs Lyster) I think that broadly it is the same.
You will find pockets where you have a small community and people
are desperate to serve on the governing body; and then you will
equally have a small community where it is very difficult to get
governors. One of the key factors in having full governing bodies
is where there is effective governance. Where people in the community
feel they do make a difference and that they are valued by every
teacher in the school, people will be queuing up to join the governing
body. Nobody minds doing the work, so long as somebody recognises
what they are doing.
David Taylor
26. Can we move on to another topic? I did say
that I did not think much of your paragraph 2, but I do think
a lot of your paragraph 1, if that balances the comment—in
particular the middle section about the response that is necessary
where schools show signs of becoming unviable. In Leicestershire,
the county council has never been under the control of my party,
but over a very long period indeed, with 400 primary schools at
one time, only one small primary schools has been closed in about
thirty years. I would be interested to hear from Mrs Lyster a
little more detail about the Dunbury example near Blandford Forum
in Dorset, because like the Government, I think federation is
probably the way ahead in very rural areas.
(Mrs Lyster) The Dunbury was formed from three schools
in the Winterbourne Valley. A problem had occurred, which will
become very acute over the next couple of years with the falling
birth rate—
27. How far are they away from each other, for
those of us who do not know that area?
(Mrs Lyster) About five to six miles between each
of the schools, and about seven or eight miles from Blandford
Forum, which would be the nearest town.
Chairman
28. Are they all feeder schools to the same
secondary school?
(Mrs Lyster) Yes. The three of them became unviable,
due to numbers, and the parents were utterly dismayed for two
reasons: that their children would not have their own school in
the village and that their school was going to disappear from
the village, and therefore there would be loss in terms of the
community aspect as well. It did take a lot of negotiation and
very many meetings to discuss issues. Then there were issues about
how the schools would be run and how many head teachers and governors
there would be—the logistics. In fact, there is one head
teacher but they have a base leader for each of the three bases.
Obviously, they have very regular staff meetings—they have
to, in order to maintain proper management and control of what
is going on within the school. It is not a system that is without
problems. However, on balance I think that it is much more advantageous
than having just closed the other schools and removed that focus
from those villages. So my view of it, and the general view of
people who use those schools, is that it is very successful.
29. Do the base teachers in the primary schools—because
you have to have an overall head—get a points payment for
being a base teacher?
(Mrs Lyster) Yes.
David Taylor
30. Can we move on to the area of information/communication/
technology, which was my special interest when I had a proper
job pre 1997. Indeed, the first debate I had, as everyone here
will know, was on the difficulties in implementing ICT in small
primary schools, particularly in rural areas. In five years it
has improved a little, but nowhere near enough. I would like the
observations of the panel in relation to the concerns that exist
across the House about the slow roll-out of broadband to some
more rural parts of the country, and how the lack of that will
disadvantage small rural primary schools. I do commend the National
Grid for Learning and all that has followed. A huge amount has
gone into that and that is good. The connection of rural schools
is at a very advanced stage in Leicestershire; but what about
broadband?
(Mrs Lyster) No chance.
31. What inducements, financial or any other,
can LEAs provide to rural primary schools?
(Mrs Lyster) There certainly needs to be something.
Within my own community, I have a husband who is desperate to
get on to broadband, never mind the schools! The BT suggestion
that if people e-mail in, when they have got 200 people they will
put broadband into the exchange, does not happen in practice.
We know that more 200 people have applied; and we are still being
told that it will not become available in our area for the time
being.
32. What should LEAs be doing?
(Mrs Lyster) If the requirement is there for schools
to have broadband, then I think the LEAs must be given power to
put influence upon the providers to encourage broadband into the
area. The viability then, surely, will increase once people see
the advantage of having broadband? I would have thought that it
ought to be self-financing eventually.
(Mrs Bennett) In Oxfordshire, the decision was made
that every school would be on broadband by the end of 2002. In
fact, my school was on broadband by January 2003, so there is
a slight slippage. I was going to say that I do not know how they
have done it, but I do know: our council tax is going to go through
the roof. We have had cuts all over the place, and other things;
but all our schools now have broadband. They have fulfilled their
promise. It is absolutely wonderful in schools. In a village like
mine, it is excessively the subject of envy by everyone else in
the village, because of course nobody in the village is on broadband
yet, even though the school is. I do not understand the technical
details at all, and I could not understand how our school was
going to be on broadband if the village was not. But I have a
friend who is a BT engineer and he explained that there was a
wire that goes straight through the local exchange to the school
and did not affect anybody else's situation. Like Sarah, we are
madly trying to count up the numbers of people who are interested
because we have a small industrial estate outside the village,
and lots of small firms are desperate to get on to broadband,
but it is still as far away as ever—unless we can find some
way of making the school a method of it happening for everybody
else.
(Mr Davies) Can I say on that point that I think there
is a two-pronged attack that could be made. One is from the local
authority putting pressure on BT to admit or even recognise that
they are holding this back. We have a prime example: "If
you cannot get broadband into an area, you cannot get broadband
into an area; I am sorry, but we can put it into a school."
If a survey has been done in Dorset where the minimum number of
people wishing to go onto broadband have signed up, and you can
prove it, BT say: "Yes, but really that rule does not apply
to you. We are still not going to do it." That is for government
to bring pressure on to BT to do something about it. But the knock-on
effect, where broadband is not accessible in schools, is in industry.
When you look at children at Key Stage 4, 14-19, and they have
not had access to some of the technology that only broadband will
download, because it is so big and complex to download, then that
will affect their careers. It will affect business ability to
operate because they are not getting the workforce adequately
trained. I am not saying that this will have a huge impact, but
there is an issue here, where broadband will help some people
in rural areas.
Chairman
33. We cannot let you go without asking you
some questions about transport, because in your submission and
virtually everybody's submission the big issue in rural areas
is transport; and school transport is a worrying problem. You
talk in your submission about parental and student choice. Can
you tell me your thoughts about the current criteria for children
who are eligible for local authority-paid school transport? What
should be done if we are going to offer real parental choice?
I know that in my constituency, if parents choose to send their
child to a primary or secondary school outside their catchment
area, they are not eligible for any help with school transport.
You mentioned, Mrs Bennett, that Oxfordshire got broadband eventually
by the council tax going up; and of course all these things would
cost. Can you say a little about the current duties and powers
of local authorities in relation to their education transport,
and what changes you as governors would like to see in rural areas
to help with the delivery and choice of education?
(Mrs Lyster) I do have quite good personal experience
of the issues. I am a mother of three children who currently attend
a secondary school that is 3.5 miles from my house, but it is
not in our catchment area. My catchment area school is 7.5 miles
from my house. There is a free bus for my children to attend the
catchment area school, but there is not any transport to allow
my children to attend the school that is actually nearest to their
house. Therefore, I am responsible for getting them to and from
their school every day, which means that I drive a car to and
from every day. I actually fill my car, but there are enormous
numbers of cars that go to and from that school which are not
full; and that is a scandalous waste of resources, energy, time
and everything else. I do think that that issue needs to be looked
at. Before becoming a governor at that school, I was a governor
of a Catholic primary school in the village where I live. That
school drew children from a 30-mile radius, so almost all of the
children were bussed in to the school. Some of the children came
from a town about eight miles away from the school, but at various
periods during my connections with the school there were only
about eight children, but they still arrived in school on a 52-seater
bus. This bus travels down the rural lanes and fills them from
hedge to hedge because it is too big for the lanes. One of my
biggest issues is that in looking at transportation as a whole,
I would like you to look more seriously at providing smaller,
more efficient forms of transport, and look more at minibuses.
They would provide a similar service to a bus, instead of these
vast vehicles, which are unsuited for tiny lanes. Most of these
lanes have walls or hedges at their sides and cannot easily be
expanded to take account of these larger vehicles. They do create
a huge problem. On many occasions, I have had a bus coming behind
me in such a lane when I have been walking, blasting a horn because
they have to get to their destination on time; otherwise, they
face penalties. That sort of thing is unacceptable. The lanes
are just not big enough to accommodate the vehicles. I have already
mentioned the two and three-mile limits. There needs to be account
taken of the geography of the area. That would be far more appropriate
than setting a finite limit that might well apply in a town or
somewhere where there were pavements. I have no objection to children
walking or cycling to school; I think it is very commendable,
and I certainly would not be someone who wanted to wrap children
in cotton wool; but you have to be realistic. There are many roads
within rural communities, on journeys between people's homes and
schools, which are just unsuitable for walking or cycling. That
is another big issue. The other issue is the huge cost. I have
been able to get hold of the figures in Dorset, which are in my
report. It is an enormous burden, and Dorset works very hard to
combine public transport with school transport, making the service
available to a wider selection of people. That is good, but there
is still the problem of over-capacity on some routes, where you
have very large vehicles with lots of empty spaces in them all
the time, which does seem very wasteful.
34. We are looking at what DEFRA could do to
help with education provision in rural areas. What would you like
to see, as governors? What is the one thing that government could
do to make the delivery of quality education in rural areas better?
(Mrs Bennett) Transport.
(Mrs Lyster) Transport, and also, even to the possible
extent where you gave schools an allocation of money to be able
to buy in transportation services, coming back again to activity-led
funding and identifying the cost of educating a child in a given
place. That is ultimately what the schools have to do, and it
is very difficult to achieve that when you have a sum that has
been conjured out of the whole country. The needs are very different.
Mr Curry
35. Would you not take that a bit further? In
my experience, whenever procurement is done by the local authority,
it always costs more because people build in a premium because
a local authority is bidding. When I have had schools in my constituency
getting things like technology status, and when the head teacher
and governors have brought that procurement in-house and bargained
with the suppliers, they have always managed to get their supplies
a great deal more cheaply than the local authority is willing
to settle for. Is there not a need to look a bit harder at procurement
issues, because I think there is a vast amount of money to be
saved?
(Mr Davies) We will settle for you altering that.
(Mrs Lyster) I agree with you broadly. Coming back
to my paragraph 2, another add-on—because I know it has
been really badly received—the secondary school that I am
a governor at would love to achieve specialist school status,
because the school is the largest employer for a radius of probably
15 miles, and so the chances of raising a large sum of money are
remote.
Chairman: We have your written submissions and
the evidence you have given today. If there is anything more you
want to add to that, please write to the clerk; but what you have
said so far is down on the record.
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