Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40 - 59)

WEDNESDAY 31 MARCH 2004

MR PETER HOUSDEN, MS PENNY JONES AND MR PETER OPENSHAW

  Q40  Mr Chaytor: The pilot phase will continue until 2011, after which there will be an independent evaluation of the pilots, with a view to a national roll-out; and realistically we are talking about 2014-15 before we get a national roll-out building on the evidence of the pilots. Is that a fair assessment?

  Ms Jones: No, that is not the case. The evaluation will take place in 2010, but we have said that the pilots will have a guarantee that they can run on to 2011, because those local authorities that take part in the pilots want a guarantee that they will not come to a juddering halt after two or three years.

  Q41  Mr Chaytor: It will be 2013 before we see that.

  Ms Jones: No. The way the legislation is crafted is that if the Secretary of State decides on the basis of the evaluation of the pilots that things are going well and wants to expand the scheme to allow the LEAs to participate in 2011, the pilot clauses automatically lapse and will disappear, so everyone who would like to run a scheme could come to us and ask to run a scheme.

  Q42  Mr Chaytor: As of 2012?

  Ms Jones: Yes.

  Mr Chaytor: Given your earlier comment on why this Bill was based on the blockage in the current legislation over the statutory walking distance, and give the Department has no view of what the statutory walking distance should be now, why not simply repeal the legislation related to statutory walking distance and devolve that to local authorities, and devolve everything else either to local authorities or to schools? Why does central Government need to hang on to its definition of statutory walking distance? It seems the most trivial area of the whole education policy. Why can we not devolve that to LEAs or individual schools?

  Q43  Chairman: Making every child over five walk three miles a day compulsorily! That is only a mischievous thought!

  Ms Jones: I suppose that in central Government we are fairly conservative people, and we want to make sure that if we propose change it will work and not disadvantage anybody. The main purpose of the existing legislation and indeed the pilots we propose is to make sure that children can get to school, and no child is unable to attend school. The reason we have left the statutory walking distances in the legislation is to make sure that no local education authority would leave a child's family in a situation whereby it was physically impossible for a child to get to school; so, if you like, it is a minimum guarantee. We think that should stay there, and we have not had anybody suggest to us that it is wrong to have that minimum guarantee staying in the legislation.

  Q44  Mr Chaytor: Surely, the essence of the pilot concept is that that minimum guarantee may well be overturned by LEA pilots?

  Ms Jones: No, because the LEA has an obligation to continue to provide transport for those pupils. You can never have a situation where there is no bus for the child to catch.

  Q45  Mr Chaytor: When you get to the evaluation of the pilots, they do not appear to establish any criteria by which they are going to be judged successful, so how can you evaluate it?

  Ms Jones: We have been very clear in everything we have said that the primary purpose of the pilots is to reduce car use on the school run; and we must make sure that for every pilot area there are the necessary facilities to make sure that this is happening.

  Q46  Mr Chaytor: You have not specified targets for the reduction of car use.

  Ms Jones: No.

  Q47  Mr Chaytor: Again, if a particular pilot scheme results in a 2.5% reduction in car use, will that be judged a success?

  Ms Jones: It is too early to say because we do not have information from individual authorities about what car use is at the moment. The National Travel Survey figures are national. So we need to look at the position now, and what it might reasonably be in a few years' time. I do not think that until we have got the analysis done at local level that it is right for us to make judgments. We must not forget that in addition to reduction in car use, there are a number of other objectives. You could get a scheme that, for example, was going to cut car use on the school run but also had some very powerful educational objectives about broadening opportunities for pupils in Key Stage 4 so that they could learn in the workplace, for example. It may well be that we would say the reduction in car use is fairly modest, but we think that what is being gained educationally from this pilot is very good, and we want to look at that and see what the results are. We do not want to be too rigid.

  Q48  Mr Chaytor: Has all this been set out anywhere? You started by saying that reduction in car use is the main criteria for evaluation; and now you are extending it to choice in curriculum at Key Stage 4. Is there a sheet of paper that sets out all the possible criteria that might be based on evaluation; or is this going to be made up as we go along?

  Ms Jones: I do not think it is fair to say it is made up as we go along. We are asking LEAs to bring proposals to us about the pilot schemes which will reduce cars on the school run, and we are also suggesting a number of other objectives which might be relevant at local level. We want local education authorities to do the analysis and decide what is important for them, and then come to us and say "this is what might reasonably be achieved" looking at the other resources we have to bring to the scheme, such as money from the local transport plan, perhaps LPSAs and perhaps doing something with concessionary fare schemes. Things are quite complex at local level, and it would be wrong for us to set too many firm objectives because there is a lot of creativity. We are talking to LEAs at the moment, and some of them are proposing things that perhaps we have not thought of. At this point, it would be wrong to close things down too early.

  Q49  Mr Chaytor: You have mentioned Key Stage 4. You mentioned the question of co-ordination at Key Stage 4. Are there any other objectives you have flagged up in advance?

  Ms Jones: Yes, there are a number of objectives in the action plan, and we have reiterated them in here. We are interested in things such as, for example, extended schools' activities that will offer a much broader range of activities over and above the school day. We are interested in making sure that pupils from all backgrounds are able to participate in sport, which will often mean after-school sport.

  Q50  Mr Chaytor: These are principles underlying the pilots rather than objectives or targets by which the pilots are going to be judged successful.

  Ms Jones: That is right, yes.

  Q51  Mr Chaytor: We do not have a set of objectives which will be published and which will form the criteria for the ultimate evaluation. How are we going to know? Who is going to decide and what will be the criteria on which they will be judged successful?

  Ms Jones: We will do that individually with each scheme. As I said earlier, at this point we cannot anticipate what is going to come to us; and some local authorities are being very creative. We want to leave it open until we have got specific schemes, and at that point we will agree targets.

  Q52  Mr Chaytor: Why is that the total number of pilots that you are looking for—20 in England and six in Wales?

  Ms Jones: I think you have to strike a balance here, do you not? First of all, a pilot scheme cannot cover everybody because that would make a nonsense of it. On the other hand, we have got to have a reasonable number of local education authorities because we want to make sure that we are covering quite a wide range of circumstances. The other complexity is that  we think we are going to get some groups of   educational authorities, particularly smaller authorities, coming together, because they have lots of flows across boundaries. When we took all those things into consideration, we thought that 20 was a reasonable number. Whether we will get them in the first round or not, I do not know. It is too early to say.

  Mr Chaytor: Why not invite all LEAs to submit bids, and if they are good bids approve them? It seems an arbitrary number, but if there are 46 excellent bids it seems arbitrary to limit it to 26.

  Q53  Chairman: As you are not giving them any money, it is not costing you anything!

  Ms Jones: The Secretary of State has decided to proceed quite carefully, and the right way to proceed is—

  Q54  Mr Chaytor: The Secretary of State decided on 26.

  Ms Jones: Twenty. I think Wales decided on six. We said between six and 12 areas because of this business of groups coming together. We have got a number of interested groups.

  Q55  Mr Chaytor: Can I ask about the question of costs, because the memorandum you supplied to the Committee, which is extremely informative, provides some very interesting figures about the costs of school transport. The one that caught my eye was the increase over the last six years in the cost of local bus contracts, which appear to be going up at about 17% a year. These are staggering increases.

  Ms Jones: Could I just strike a note of caution here. These are the percentage increases when bus contracts are renewed, and the average length of contract is three years, so these are not year-on-year increases.

  Q56  Mr Chaytor: What is the figure for year-on-year increases? The total number across the country on school transport has increased significantly.

  Ms Jones: Yes.

  Q57  Mr Chaytor: That is one of the Government's concerns.

  Ms Jones: That is right.

  Q58  Mr Chaytor: What is your best estimate of year-on-year increases in terms of prices?

  Ms Jones: I do not think I would want to make a guess, because some of these contracts are just flat but most of them have the renewal cost but then have an inflationary increase year-on-year built in, so it is quite a complex picture.

  Q59  Mr Chaytor: Do you have a figure for the annual increase in the total costs of running school transport?

  Ms Jones: Yes, we have provided these for you.


 
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