Memorandum submitted by the National Association
for Small Schools (T5)
INTRODUCTION
A. We are a charitable community organisation
representing people who believe in and wish to support small schools.
As such we are very concerned that closures be avoided, particularly
in rural areas as that is where most small schools are. We are
also naturally concerned to promote good practice both in teaching
and in that range of activities that is best termed partnership
with the local community.
B. We believe the school in the village
represents a unique form of service to that community, a service
that must be seen to have economic worth in debates about closure
premised invariably on the alleged higher costs of maintaining
small schools. We note a school in North Yorkshire that has recently
enabled a local shop to open on its premises, and, similarly,
in Wales and in Somerset we are aware of a post-office opening
on school premises, or planned to do so. These are very new forms
of that partnership bespeaking the rich and as yet unfilled potential
of the concept. We believe it is possible to centre a wide range
of important traditional and new community services via the village
school as the agency and that the survival of what is often the
one piece of public plant still available in many rural communities
is essential in that cause.
C. Your Inquiry addresses the issue of retention
and ways to ensure rural schools can continue to deliver the required
standards of education. It particularly addresses the past and
potential future roles of DEFRA inn helping bring this about,
not least through "joined-up thinking" with other providing
departments such as the Department for Education and Skills. We
believe the concept of the survival of the rural school connects
with other issues that may concern other branches of government
such as Employment and Transport as well as Heritage issues.
THE POSITIVE
AND NEGATIVE
ASPECTS OF
THE CURRENT
SITUATION REGARDING
CLOSURE
1. The principal department involved with
rural schools will be the DES and it is in respect of the performance
of that department that our submission is expressly concerned.
2. Following the issue of Circular 110/98
in which the first Blair Government issued its statement of faith
in village schools, saying that there should be "a presumption
against closure" because, to use words in other Ministerial
documents and statements, "Villages need their schools,"
successive Secretaries of State made several important decisions
keeping small schools open, on appeal from local campaigners,
against the wishes of local authorities who would have closed
them.
3. The Government, through the DES made
very useful grants available to small schools, though using a
roll size of 200 which seemed rather generous when the standard
OFSTED definition is 100 or less. These grants were well targeted
with precisely the more pressing needs of small schools in mind,
namely the benefits of links with other schools as a way to take
advantage of those benefits of large scale that were useful, and
funding release time for headteachers from administration to free
them for pedagogic work leading teachers and monitoring standards.
4. Small school headteachers will affirm
that they experience the several pressures of modern requirement
besetting all schools but their profession is characterised by
a love of the job itself which helps make effort worthwhile and
which has been recognised by OFSTED as a significant factor in
the regularly reported success of small schools. Currently the
most effective schools in demonstrating improvement in the later
rounds of school inspection are the smallest ones.
5. This healthy state of affairs, with national
government endorsing the work of and worth of small schools was
accompanied by the growing evidence from test scores and OFSTED
inspections that small schools were delivering high standards
of teaching, and leadership, with the pupils attaining levels
at least on a par with the rest and in some respects better. NASS
has never doubted the ability of small schools to deliver an effective
curriculum and deliver it well. Almost all the available research
in the modern era has confirmed this. Your Inquiry should not
start from any premise that doubts that.
6a. You are right to sense nevertheless
that certain conditions could threaten it, notably the still increasing
burden on small schools of the bureaucracy, the administrative
overload, now affecting all schools.
(i) For example the DES asks schools to send
four teachers to a regional conference on something very important
like the new numeracy strategy and simply ignores the fact that
10% of the nation's schools simply do not have four teachers.
(ii) The financial pressure of the important
job of security screening, especially now that even volunteer
parent helpers and dinner ladies and anyone has to be police screened
now is hitting budgets of small schools very hard. It is as if
the DES has no in-built mechanisms for flexibility in such requirements,
no ways and means to tailor administrative strategies more flexibly
and sensitively.
(iii) The emphasis on target-setting on crude
percentage improvement requirement principles takes scant regard
of the fact that in small age groups the range of ability can
vary enormously from year to year. It shows in SATs when, for
example, with only three children in the test group, the year
that one is a child with low ability or has special needs automatically
drops the potential success from 100% to 66.67%, and no possible
gentler scaling. The fact that many schools already secure 100%
most of the time makes target-setting difficult, too. These are
examples of a range of issues where the smallness of scale is
not allowed to impinge on the thinking of DES officials.
(iv) A typical example last year was the
answer by Stephen Twigg MP, Minister of State, to a question about
possible links between school size and standards attained in SATs.
A DES official provided the data but included in the total performance
of small schools, that is schools with 10 or less per age group,
maximum around 70 on roll, the performance of schools dedicated
to Special Needs children. There are a lot of these in the small
school category. No-one expects them to reach national targets
or anything like. The effect of including such scores with those
of the conventional small schools was so to depress the performance
such that the Minister added the interpretation that while in
larger schools size did not readily correlate with performance,
children in smaller schools had less chance to reach them..
This was a serious misleading of Parliament,
potentially damage to schools resisting closure proposals because
it would enable education officers now normally relying on financial
arguments to return to the tired, old shibboleths that true test
results and inspections are now disproving, namely that small
schools could not really cope with the work. NASS objected to
this and secured corrected figures from the DES but these were
never presented to the House. It is another example of administrative
insensitivity to smallness.
6b. We would urge that no new circular be
issued without it having been screened by an officer charged with
sensitivity to the smallness of scale that applies in 10 to 15%
of the nation's primary schools
7. We now move to a worrying new pressure
on the survival of small rural schools. In circular 110/98 the
Government declared too many small rural schools had closed and
promising an end to wholesale closure (of the type we had seen
resulting from whole area reviews, for example when Warwickshire
returned to two-tier organisation from its earlier three-tier
system.) However, in 2000 the Government abdicated most of its
responsibility for provision by establishing an allegedly neutral,
impartial system of local School Organisation Committees who,
would ultimately determine matters of provision in their area.
8. We respected the philosophy but feared
the worst as is now materialising. The history of local pubic
services shows respect for the principle of devolution but practice
has never been free from partiality while the majority groups
deploying such partiality have become elected by increasingly
smaller cadres of the electorate they serve.
9. The new system is far from neutral and
impartial. The Government's guidance, criteria like "presumption
against closure," along with being popular with parents and
useful in the local community, do not seem to be the starting
point for debate at crucial SOC meetings where there can seem
some motivation to act but as another sub-Committee of the elected
authority. NASS is receiving a growing level of complaints from
different parts of the country at what is sometimes seen as an
almost cavalier failure to consider guidance criteria in the face
of heavy local authority arguments. We do not suppose this to
be universal. Of course, some SOCs have acted as the system intended,
using those guidelines and weighing issues fairly and impartially.
10. The original scheme is nevertheless
flawed. The SOC functions via a number of sub-Committees representing
particular local issues. Each of these has to decide its position.
At the full, final meeting of full SOC only these group votes
count and unless one sub-group resists the rest, in other words
if the decisions are unanimous, there is no right of appeal for
the school involved, even if the decision is a closure one, to
the Adjudicators set up by the Government as part of the system.
The case goes to them only if the SOC is not unanimous.
(a) The customary sub-Committees must include
one that directly represents the authority, elected councillors
in proportion to the power within the authority. It is almost
certain this group will endorse the majority party's proposals.
(b) There is then a Church group, with significant
reserve arguments to protect Church place provision if they care
to use them. However, as has often been seen, the Church can gain
financially from the sale of buildings and land after school closure
and Church representatives can be mandated to a diocesan policy
determined elsewhere. There can also be a conflict of interest,
often undeclared, where the parish priest of the school being
proposed for closure also serves the receiving school's parish
(c) The third sub-group often includes members
of the local school community, teachers, headteachers, governors
maybe, and it is often the case that if a particular school is
closed some other school benefits. Headteachers of larger schools
have been known to object to what they see as partial, privileged
funding of small schools at the expense of their own needs. The
Standards Funding arrangements were a particular problem in LEAs
whose local contribution had to be sliced from existing school
budgets. A major teaching union leader earlier this year went
public in a newspaper report with a view said to be personal that
all schools under 50 on roll were unviable.
Thus in this SOC sub-group, too, it is possible
that already prejudicial opinion can come to bear. Each sub-group
can and often does have a vested interest in approving the closure
of a small, rural school. Their justification is always by endorsement
of the local authority's case, invariably a case made on financial
grounds and as a response to a particular government requirement
upon local authorities to use classroom and school space effectively.
11. We are also concerned that the DES gives
standard measures of guidance to local authorities that prove
damaging when applied to small school cases. For example a recent
Metropolitan Borough SOC decision was made not on the merits of
the arguments for and against the school but on the curious question
of whether the school was rural or not. The SOC wanted to recognise
the government's criteria but the LEA claimed that a school established
as a village school more than 100 years ago and still serving
a rural community on the urban fringe, was nevertheless within
a certain key distance of sufficient secondary schools not to
be rural under new DES definitions that certainly do not help
secure the future of education in rural areas. Feedback to the
school campaigners made it clear no-one on the SOC really doubted
the school serve a village community but the DES definition was
everything. The decision that it was NOT rural merely removed
the protection of the government criteria but there was then no
time to debate even so whether the school should close.
12. As affirmed earlier, where an SOC decision
is unanimous, there is no automatic right of independent appeal,
as to the Secretary of State before.
Contrast this in another Metropolitan Borough,
where two years after Estelle Morris kept the school open against
the Borough's wishes, the LEA again put the school up under the
new system, only to be rejected again by the two non-LEA sub-groups,
in this case honouring the hard case evidence in favour of the
school. However, the third sub-group, the LEA members' group,
as highly predictable, simply voted against, thereby meaning the
reprieve was not unanimous and they could secure a chance to have
their case heard by the Adjudicator. Under the SOC system the
LEA can always get a failed case to the adjudication stage. The
school community cannot.
B. THE FINANCIAL
PRESSURE MOTIVATING
ALMOST ALL
CLOSURE PROPOSALS
1. The Audit Commission has revealed a significant
number of unfilled school places up and down the country and governments
are rightly concerned at the ensuing costs of maintaining them.
However, the Commission made it clear that the bulk of the problem
was in larger and urban schools. Their case against small schools
was purely the conventional viability one and they had the forethought
to anticipate further evidence emerging on that question, as it
has now done in the form of very good test and inspection results.
Thus there is little Audit Commission justification for proposing
a rural school closure. Yet many majority Parties proposing school
closures say they are under pressure from District Auditors acting
on Audit Commission findings. Occasionally there may be marginally
surplus numbers of places but these are an infinitesimal part
of the scale of the real problem facing the local authorities
concerned.
2. It is exceedingly difficult to do much
else about the bulk of surplus places in the towns. When a new
estate is built on one side of the town a school is needed. It
is not possible in reality to say to parents that their children
must be bussed daily for six years to a school on the other side
of town originally built for 340 for an earlier estate but that
now has only 160 on roll. We recognise the difficulty for local
authorities but not their consequent gesture to the DES to avoid
grant penalty by closing some schools, namely small village schools
mainly on the urban fringe, or by amalgamating a set of smaller
schools needed by their own villages into one new large school
on but one site serving only one of those communities.
3. The Government has argued that "Villages
need their schools!" Even so it has required local authorities
under the new SOC system to review their overall provision and
submit reorganisation plans determined under the allegedly neutral
and impartial scrutiny of SOCs.
4. The decision flies in the face of the
supposed protection for village schools unless the SOC system
pays more respect to the Government's own criteria for retaining
village schools. Many SOC decisions seem only to be influenced
by the parameters of the reorganisation issues.
5. The decision flies in the face of the
Government's own assertion in circular 110/98 that there should
be an end to wholesale programmes of closure such as are emerging
in these new reviews and reorganisations. Some local authorities
with a history of antipathy towards small schools seem almost
to have welcomed the chance to find fresh cause to seek closures.
6. There is, thus, a contradictory pressure
from the government on local authorities both to rationalise unfilled
places and preserve small schools which is not proving possible
to accommodate. Closing smaller schools is an easier option and
DEFRA is urged to open discussions with the DES on issues hereby
arising that conflict with Rural White Paper principles and provision
as well as desired future practice.
7. School closure remains a serious crisis
for any village community. Not only does it remove a service currently
available that OFSTED already acknowledges has educational as
well as community significance. It closes down for ever the potential
to create that even richer brand of community work in which NASS
firmly believes and which the Rural White Paper reflects in several
important ways and within which primary school years are but a
chapter in lifelong education.
8. Correspondingly we believe the DES needs
to work far more closely with DEFRA than it seems to do to create
the positive climate within administrative arrangement and regulation,
including a refining of the SOC system in the light of emerging
inefficiencies, so that the government's clear commitment philosophically
to the role and worth of the village school may be better respected
and honoured.
9. Moreover we also believe that the issues
relating to the future of the village school have socio-economic
significance of direct relevance to national spending in that
the returns to the Exchequer of investment in such ideas, including
in the Early Years of a child's life, are likely to prove considerable
in the longer term. American experience of similarly socio-educational
projects involving early educational investment have been quantified
to show that for every dollar initially invested the return is
now more than ten dollars in enhanced revenues from more effective
education leading to higher qualifications and better jobs as
well as from reduced social costs from failure, social and personal
distress and community breakdown.
CONCLUSIONS
1. We are aware of growing discontent with
the School Organisation Committee System which is threatening
to escalate the rate of school closures at a time when the Government
has clearly expressed its view that villages need their schools
and, while operating under the former system of school provision
based on the DES and the Secretary of State, clearly acted to
retain small village schools. There is a serious risk now that
nationally-desirable safeguards to which children have a right
are being sacrificed in favour of narrowly perceived local interests.
2. Furthermore we believe there needs to
be a greater recognition of and sensitivity toward the particular
constraints of smallness of scale when planning general policies
and regulation along with a more committed partnership with DEFRA
and relevant Countryside Agencies.
We would be happy to add further if invited
to do so.
24 February 2003
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