House of Commons - Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Ninth Report

2.Delivering education in rural areas

Transport

13. The availability and cost of public transport in rural areas, and the special provision made by Local Education Authorities (LEAs) for students attending schools and colleges, were raised by nearly all those who submitted evidence to the inquiry. The Local Government Association described transport as "critical to the success of education in rural areas".[9] As a policy area which crosses Government departments it is also an issue where we would expect Defra to take a lead in co-ordinating approaches in rural areas.

14. LEAs have certain statutory duties in relation to education transport. They must provide free transport to school for pupils of compulsory school age if they attend the nearest school and that school is beyond the statutory walking distance (two miles for children under eight years of age and three miles for children aged eight and above). They also have discretionary powers to help other pupils with fares.

15. The statutory walking distances were established in the Education Act 1944. Witnesses told us that they were now out-of-date and did not reflect current realities. It is often unsafe for children to walk two or three miles to school, even if accompanied, mainly because of far heavier traffic than could have been imagined when the legislation was introduced. A representative of the Local Government Association also highlighted potential anomalies within the current system. For example, the family of a child who lives 3.1 miles away from a school may get totally free transport but a child whose family live 2.9 miles away will receive nothing.[10] The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education told us that his Department was "looking at this in conjunctions with colleagues and officials in the Department for Transport".[11]

16. We welcome the Education Minister's statement to us that the DfES and the Department for Transport are examining this issue.We recommend that the internal review of statutory walking distances be extended to a public consultation with a deadline for implementation of a new system. We urge the Government to overhaul radically the current arrangements. A new system should be based on an assessment of safety issues and the real alternatives to walking and not just crudely based on distance from school. Defra and DfES should ensure that the particular needs of rural areas are taken into account.

17. The Government is committed, through the England Rural Development Plan, to improving access to rural services such as education. The Minister for Rural Affairs told us that the role of Defra in relation to school transport was to "try to get people to think laterally".[12] However, we were disappointed that Defra seemed unable to provide any examples of where such lateral thinking had produced original transport solutions in rural areas. A number of other witnesses described innovative schemes which had been introduced by LEAs. For example, Lincolnshire has introduced a scheme called "park and stride" which encourages car sharing and walking to school from designated parking areas to reduce congestion at the school gates.[13] Other areas, for example Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, have introduced a dedicated 'yellow bus' service which operates in partnership with the LEA, local schools and parents.

18. Some Government initiatives rely on good home-to-school transport. For example, the DfES and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport have launched a national strategy for school sport.[14] This includes a target to increase the percentage of 5-16 year olds who spend a minimum of two hours each week on high-quality PE and school sport, within and beyond the curriculum, from 25% in 2002 to 75% by 2006. It aims to reach all children by 2007. We believe that the extra-curricular opportunities this initiative offers should be available to all. In rural areas, this will depend on flexible and low cost home-to-school transport provision.

19. There is clearly scope for innovation in the area of home-to-school transport. Given this, we were disappointed by Defra's relative lack of involvement in finding solutions. We were also surprised that the Countryside Agency's recent report on Transport in Tomorrow's Countryside makes little reference to education transport. We believe that Defra should be involved at a local level with LEAs to bring together resources and implement innovative transport schemes which, where successful, can be replicated in different parts of the country. Defra should identify and fund solutions which would meet the needs of families in rural communities. The aim of these schemes should be to reduce reliance on cars and enable all school pupils to take part in out-of-school activities.

20. In respect of post-compulsory education, provisions in the Education Act 2002 require LEAs, from January 2003, to work with Learning and Skills Councils, and others, to meet the transport needs of students aged 16 to 19. LEAs are required to ensure that students are not prevented from accessing and completing their courses because of the availability of transport or their ability to afford it. The Government has made available £9 million in 2002—03 for up to 76 LEAs to undertake transport development work in relation to post-compulsory students.[15] These LEAs are 'pathfinders' and were selected, in part, with reference to the extent to which they cover isolated, rural areas. Additional funding from September 2003 will be made available to help local partnerships provide effective and sustainable transport support. The Government argues that these new arrangements will complement the national extension of the Educational Maintenance Allowances from September 2004 and will "make a significant improvement to transport support generally and for rural areas in particular".[16]

21. The Association of Colleges welcomed the national extension of the Educational Maintenance Allowances and described the approach as "very positive".[17] However, they told us that colleges were losing students from rural areas because the existing transport links were ineffective and expensive.[18] They argued that solutions to transport problems in rural areas had concentrated on providing services to enable people to access shops and services and had failed to address problems for people wanting to travel to college or work.

22. We were told of examples of good practice where local authorities, the local Learning and Skills Council and providers are working together to meet the transport needs of post-compulsory students. We remain concerned, however, that such good practice and innovation is not widespread. The Countryside Agency's Wheels to Work scheme funds special schemes, such as subsidised moped hire, to help young unemplo yed people travel to work. The Rural Affairs Minister told us that the scheme is "one of the greatest successes of recent times". Yet there is no equivalent scheme for post-compulsory students. Defra should examine the lessons of the Wheels to Work Scheme and fund a similar scheme which would develop innovative transport solutions for post-16 students in isolated rural areas.

23. We welcome the steps that the Government has taken to improve transport provision for the 16-19 age group. We particularly welcome the national extension of the Educational Maintenance Allowance and believe that, when introduced, the allowance will help students in rural areas with the additional costs of travel to school and college. However, it is clear that in certain isolated rural areas, the lack of available and affordable transport is likely to remain a major barrier to participation and retention rates of post-compulsory students. Defra has a key role in monitoring the effect of the various government initiatives and pilot projects to help post-16 students attend school and college. We recommend that Defra publish examples of good practice by LEAs in rural areas, and also identify those LEAs where students are prevented from attending school and college because of poor transport provision.

Information and Communications Technology

24. Together with available and affordable transport, the provision of information and communications technology (ICT) was one of the most important issues for many of those who provided evidence to our inquiry. The Government also stresses the importance of ICT as a way of reducing the isolation of rural schools and colleges.

25. The Rural White Paper states that ICT provision "opens up a whole range of possibilities, including: access to study support and discussion groups for teachers and pupils who, for reasons of distance, cannot otherwise link into training or after school hours activities; availability of school ICT facilities for use by the community; and opportunities for fully interactive distance learning, which the roll out of broadband technologies to rural schools will bring".[19] The latest Government target is that "every primary and secondary school in England will have broadband Internet access by 2006".[20] The Government has allocated £300 million over the next three years to provide all schools with broadband capability and a sparsity factor is included in the resource allocation formula to take account of the higher costs of providing broadband connections to rural schools.[21]

26. Some LEAs who provided evidence to our inquiry argued that the additional costs of providing broadband in rural areas were not being met by central government as the sparsity adjustment did not reflect the higher costs.[22] The funding regime also failed to recognise related costs such as support services which are particularly difficult in small, rural primary schools. However, most felt that, though rural schools would be the last to be connected, the Government's target of connecting all schools to broadband by 2006 would be met.

27. Monitoring progress in rural areas towards the Government's target is not straightforward. The Countryside Agency said that by August 2002, 23% of all schools had a broadband connection with a forecast of 40% by 2003. The Agency also noted that the position in rural schools was not clear "since the DfES do not currently provide an urban/rural breakdown".[23] The DfES' annual survey of ICT in schools has not contained separate figures for rural schools since 1998. The DfES told us that information on the urban/rural split was not available because LEAs are not required to collect it. It relies on "anecdotal evidence" from the Regional Broadband Consortia.[24]

28. We welcome the Government's commitment to ensuring all schools have a broadband connection by 2006. We also welcome the fact that many witnesses believe that this target will be met. We recommend that the DfES publish regular updates showing progress towards the target. It should ensure that separate figures for urban and rural areas are collected and published. Neither the DfES nor Defra appear to have carried out any work to assess the additional costs of providing a broadband connection to schools in sparsely populated rural areas compared to urban areas. Similarly, we were told that rural schools also have particular problems procuring suitable on-going support for their IT systems. We recommend that an assessment be made of the additional costs of providing good IT systems in rural schools. Defra should take the lead in assessing whether the additional money for rural schools made available through the sparsity factor adequately reflects these additional costs, and should publish its findings.

29. The Education Minister told us that the Government considers that a fixed-line broadband connection offers the best possibilities for schools. This is likely to mean that rural schools will be the last to be connected. It may be that a fixed-line connection is the only viable option. This is an issue on which we intend to comment in more detail in our forthcoming report on broadband in rural areas. We recommend that the DfES consider the extent to which satellite broadband technology can increase the rate at which rural schools are being provided with a broadband connection. We also recommend that the Government assess how broadband connections to rural schools might be exploited by the rural community more generally.

30. In response to a question about Defra's involvement in developing the use of broadband in rural schools, and from there by the local community, the Rural Affairs Minister told us that Defra had seconded one member of staff to the DTI's broadband taskforce and one member of staff to a regional development agency.[25] Broadband access in schools is a critical issue for rural areas both in terms of the importance to the education provision for children in these areas and the opportunities it offer to help make rural schools the hub of the local community. We do not think that seconding two members of staff is an adequate response to this issue from a Government Department which is supposed to represent the interests of rural areas. Defra should be taking a lead role in monitoring the implementation of broadband in rural schools and the opportunities this offers to rural communities. Again we are disappointed that its role appears to be largely tangential.

Protecting and enhancing schools in rural areas

Small schools

31. Many rural schools are also small schools. The Small Schools Fund is allocated to LEAs according to the number of primary and special schools with less than 200 pupils or less and secondary schools with 600 pupils or less. In 2003-04 funding is made as part of the new School Support Staff grant and is worth £80 million per year. The funding is intended to support collaborative projects, such as shared administrative staff. Also, LEAs can retain a small percentage of the funding to set up projects, such as 'clustering' of small schools to share resources. The Government told us that the funding encourages the development of innovative approaches to raise standards.[26]

32. The National Association for Small Schools described the grant as "very useful".[27] Individual LEAs also provided examples of how they had used the grant to develop local projects. We urge the Government to continue to provide grants to LEAs which support collaborative projects between small schools. The potential benefits of clustering should be explored as widely as possible across the age and ability range. The Government should support clustering and publicise examples of good practice from LEAs.

33. There are concerns that some small schools cannot effectively deliver the National Curriculum or a sufficiently wide range of extra-curricular activities. The National Association for Small Schools told us that small schools receive good OFSTED reports and deliver "the best SATs results year after year".[28] Other witnesses told us that small schools were fully represented among the schools identified by OFSTED "as schools having serious weaknesses or schools requiring special measures".[29] We do not believe there is any substantiated evidence that small rural schools necessarily offer either a better or worse standard of education than larger urban ones. Generalisations about the relative performance of small and large schools should therefore be avoided.

Presumption against closure

34. The Government recognised the importance of the village school in the Rural White Paper. In an attempt to reverse the number of school closures, in 1998, the Government introduced a policy of a presumption against closure for rural schools. This policy is now given effect in the guidance issued to School Organisation Committees (SOCs) which are the statutory bodies with responsibility for decisions about school closures. The policy does not preclude the closure of a small rural school; it does, however, require the SOC to take into account a number of factors before sanctioning a closure, such as the overall effect of closure on the local community.

35. The policy of a presumption against closure appears to have been effective in slowing the number of closures of rural schools. The Minister told us that the number of closures had fallen from around 30 per year in the years prior to 1998 to an average of four per year in recent years.[30] We welcome the Government's policy of a presumption against closure of rural schools and the associated fall in the number of rural schools which have closed. The National Association for Small Schools told us that while they welcomed the Government's action on closures, they remain concerned. In particular, they suggested that although the presumption against closure policy was an effective one, another government policy militated against it. They argued that the pressure put on local authorities, through the best value framework, to reduce surplus places can increase the pressure on some LEAs to close small schools.[31]

36. A number of LEAs who submitted evidence to our inquiry agreed that the pressure to reduce surplus places was a problem in the context of the presumption against school closure policy. Some also suggested that the policy needed to be supported financially because of the additional costs of maintaining small schools. Cheshire LEA summarised the issues: "Local authorities need to be reassured that in terms of funding flows and inspection frameworks the presumption against closure of small rural primary schools is taken fully into account and will not disadvantage those local authorities with significant numbers of such schools. Maintaining surplus places may bring social benefits but is often a direct cost to the local authority concerned. In order to function at all many small schools require a subsidy within the local funding formula. The new funding arrangements for local government provide, at best, a tenuous link between the presumption against closure policy and the funding needed to support it."[32]

37. We are concerned about the pressures on LEAs to rationalise school places and believe that this can act against the presumption against closure policy. Defra should take the lead in ensuring that there is consistency in government policies related to rural schools. We recommend that Defra work with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to revise the best value framework so that LEAs do not face pressure to reduce surplus places by closing small, rural schools that are viable.

38. There appears to be some evidence that, in future, falling rolls in some areas may lead to an increase in the number of closures.[33] We are therefore surprised that there appears to be little work being carried out, other than at a local level, to assess the extent to which population trends in rural areas are likely to affect school rolls. Defra states that it recognises the importance of village schools to the local community. Yet we found no evidence that Defra is monitoring the number of closures in rural areas or the effect that closures may have on the local rural community.

39. We agree that decisions about whether small rural schools remain viable should be based primarily on educational considerations and policy should be led by DfES. Nevertheless, Defra should play a role in dealing with the effects of closure on rural communities. We recommend that Defra work closely with LEAs to monitor school rolls in rural areas and publish a report identifying those areas most at risk. Defra should work with the relevant LEAs and the DfES over decisions about school closures, provide assistance, where appropriate, to maintain village schools, and work with local authorities to support communities where schools are closed.

Extended Schools Initiative

40. An important factor in the viability of small, rural schools is the extent to which they act as a community resource. In the Rural White Paper, the Government describes how a rural school can act as the hub of the local community providing services such as sports facilities, after-school clubs, neighbourhood learning centres, libraries, play schools and nurseries, and lunch clubs for pensioners.[34] Provisions in the Education Act 2002 were introduced to make it easier for school governing bodies to provide additional facilities. On 13 March 2003, the DfES announced its extended schools initiative to create 240 extended schools by 2006.[35] Funding of £52.2 million over three years will initially be targeted at the most disadvantaged areas and then rolled out progressively to all areas.

41. We welcome the extended schools initiative and support the Government's vision of the rural school as the hub of the local community. We are also reassured by the fact that of the 25 Pathfinder projects, six are based in rural areas: Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Durham, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Northumberland. We remain concerned, however, that the use of the deprivation index to identify the most disadvantaged areas for future funding may limit the extent to which the initiative reaches rural areas. The deprivation index often fails to identify small pockets of deprivation in rural areas. The extended schools initiative is particularly important for rural areas where there is less chance that other providers will be offering the services that an extended school will be able to offer. We urge the Government to consider the needs of rural areas carefully as it prepares the extended schools policy and to ensure that rurality is a positive criterion for qualifying for available funds.