Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
WEDNESDAY 31 MARCH 2004
MR PETER
HOUSDEN, MS
PENNY JONES
AND MR
PETER OPENSHAW
Q60 Mr Chaytor: There is a chart
(Annex K) showing the increase from 2000-01 to 2001-02, which
shows an increase.
Ms Jones: Yes. I will look for
it in the pack. If it is not here, I will supply the figures[7].
Mr Openshaw: If it would be helpful,
I think my department calculated that the annualised increase
for local transport contracts was around 7.5%. This is taken over
the last three years. As the contracts seem to have increased
less for school transport, scaling that down it would perhaps
be somewhere in the order of 5%. The rate of increase also appears
to be falling over the last three years, which is a relatively
encouraging sign.
Q61 Mr Chaytor: Looking at the costs
for each local authority, you have provided a chart that gives
us the average cost per pupil for special schools in the unitaries
but not in other LEAs. Is there a special band for special schools?
Ms Jones: No, they are all there.
They were all provided. It is an issue of, when you printed it
out there were a number of different graphs on the one. We have
had this question before. I do have all the information here and
I can leave it with the Committee.
Q62 Mr Chaytor: Could I pursue the
question. In terms of unitaries for special schools, there are
absolutely enormous variations between what is spent by Windsor
and Maidenhead and what is spent by Redcar and Cleveland, for
example. What analysis have you done of the reasons for these
enormous variations in transport for special schools?
Ms Jones: We do have a research
project in place at the moment looking at this and other things.
It is a pattern of the way that special education is provided
and I think it is very important not to look at these figures
in isolation. If I could give an example of an authority which
is very inclusive and only has the high dependency children in
special schools: of course the per capita cost would be very high,
because you would be looking at children perhaps needing oxygen
on the journey to school, for example, so you would have very
few children travelling to special schools and very high cost.
If, however, you have an authority which has a large number of
pupils in special schools, clearly the opposite applies: you have
some children who can perhaps use normal transport.
Q63 Mr Chaytor: Is not the corollary
of that that the authorities with very high costs are not just
to do with management of transport but management including transport.
Ms Jones: I agree because transport
is really quite a small area of the total cost. You have other
trade-offs to make; for example, not to send a child to school
every day, or you may look at putting them in some kind of boarding
arrangement where of course you have different costs altogether.
Q64 Mr Chaytor: Leaving special schools,
I have one final point about total transport costs. Even though
the chart does not name the LEAs but lists them according to their
LEA numbers, there are huge differences between transport costs
in LEAs. Again, have you done any analysis for the reasons for
those differences? Can we draw any conclusions in terms of total
transport objectives as to why some LEAs have greater costs than
others? Is it simply a question of the sparsity of operation or
of admissions policy?
Ms Jones: We have had a look at
this and it is quite difficult to draw firm conclusions. Some
of those at the most expensive end are those authorities where
there are fairly small numbers of mainstream pupils travelling
to mainstream schools and it is mainly special education pupils
attending mainstream schools. I think we need to take those out.
When we look at the other authorities it depends on a number of
things. I have the figures for the Isle of Wight and West Sussex,
for example, where they have very good staggering arrangements
between their schools so they can provide transport with a low
number of buses, and they have relatively low per capita costs.
We also have a number of other authorities where there are
very good concessionary fare schemes established. I have put Durham
in here, for example, and they have fairly low costs. It is really
quite complex.
Q65 Mr Chaytor: There is no general
characterisation of the kind of LEAs that have particularly high
transport costs of which you are aware.
Ms Jones: No. It depends on a
number of local factors which interact.
Q66 Mr Chaytor: Does it not follow,
given that you have set a limit of 20 pilot schemes in England,
that it is not necessarily going to be the 20 LEAs with the worst
management of school transport that will be selected as a successful
pilot school? You could be getting the LEAs with the best track
record being chosen as a pilot scheme. Is that not the wrong way
round?
Ms Jones: I think we have made
it quite clear in the prospectus that capacity is one thing we
are going to look at. We are going to ask local education authorities
what their track record is of running efficient school transport
services, particularly their capacity to work across the authority,
so that they can lever in good profitable arrangements, things
which help the broader community, on which they can draw in people
from the transport side. Indeed, we want to make sure they have
good relationships with their bus operators, for example, and
they must have schools on side as well.
Mr Housden: I think this is a
really important passage of examination really because the question
has drawn out that the local authority's pattern of expenditure
very often will be a consequence of decisions that it has taken.
Some of it will be circumstance, bio-geographical layout and so
forth, but a lot of this will be about the example given on its
special educational needs policy and authorities take those decisions
in the light of the information they have. I think the important
thing for us, though, is to make sure that it is not just the
20 authorities within the pilot who are aware of what is good
practice in managing well the consequences of the decisions they
have taken. If you take a particular view about special schools,
for example, that generates a particular set of imperatives about
managing transport. We are talking with the Local Government Association
about making sure that best practice is spread through the system
well. We would like to see some clear benchmarks established so
that comparator authorities who have broadly similar circumstances
know what their per capita costs are and there is a local pressure.
The best value review mechanism through local government also
provides the opportunity for people to look systematically.
I would be disappointed if over the life of this pilot scheme
we did not see the overall competence/performance/effectiveness
of local authorities increasing, not just in the 20.
Q67 Chairman: There is a fear that
there is a danger coming out of this line of questioning that
you will take your 20 to 26 pilots and all the rest will sit back
and say, "Let's wait until 2011 and find out what is going
to come down from on high." What surely the departments should
be doing is encouraging much better levels of proficiency in providing
school transport now.
Mr Housden: Yes.
Q68 Chairman: As I said earlier,
the technologies are there. For goodness' sake, the revolution
in technology for even fleets of taxis—in terms of their
availability, their positioning using global positioning and very
sophisticated IT programmes—is what we want rolled out tomorrow
really, not waiting for a pilot that will be effective a long
time in the future.
Mr Housden: I agree completely
with that. Things like the cost pressures that Paul Holmes was
speaking about, the parental pressures that Helen Jones was talking
about, will help all 150 local authorities move forward. We think
the school travel planning exercise alongside the bill will create
the right sort of momentum to do that—your point that technology
creates new opportunities. It is very important that we have a
vigorous professional debate and some impetus behind all people
improving. We accept that completely.
Chairman: As long as we have that twin-track
approach.
Q69 Jeff Ennis: It appears to me
that the Government in some respects is sending out mixed messages
on this particular issue. We are willing to provide grants to
individual schools of up to £5,000 or £10,000 and yet
we are not offering a penny to local education authorities. What
is the incentive there? Some local authorities might say that
this is an issue: "The Department has directed resources
at individual schools, why should we bother in going through all
the hassle when we are not going to get one extra penny?"
Mr Housden: I think it is a judgment
really about whether there is scope within the existing £2
billion public expenditure—which is not an inconsiderable
sum—for local authorities with their wider partners, particularly
bus contractors, to make better use of that money. That is clearly
the view that ministers in both departments have taken, that this
is not anything that requires specific additional pump priming,
that the range of financial and other resources open to local
authorities is sufficient for important progress to be made. I
think the evidence for that is the fact that within the existing
level of funding there is a substantial variation in performance
across different authorities.
Q70 Jeff Ennis: So why provide the
incentive for the individual schools? If there is enough money
in the system anyway, £2 billion, why do we have to provide
additional resource for individual schools?
Mr Housden: I think there are
two dimensions to that. One is that in many cases we think they
will meet real costs which they would not be able to meet within
their existing budgets; for example, changing facilities, cycling,
adaptations to paths, lighting within the school grounds and so
forth, all of those things which from our existing experience
have been shown to need capital. We also felt it was important,
if we wanted rapid movement towards all schools having a school
travel plan, that there was an incentive available for them to
do that. Bear in mind that schools, even the largest, do not have
anything approaching the financial scale and flexibility that
is open to a local authority.
Q71 Jeff Ennis: The document outlines
quite a rigorous consultation exercise that the LEA or group of
LEAs have to undergo to put their pilot forward. Have you estimated
what the actual cost of undergoing that rigorous consultation
exercise is going to be for individual or groups of authorities?
Mr Housden: I do not believe we
have. I suspect the grounds for that really are that the costs
will vary according to the mechanisms the local authority has
in place already which it can build upon and use, and the extent
to which it has to make special arrangements.
Q72 Jeff Ennis: So it could use existing
governor forums and neighbourhood forums.
Mr Housden: We hope they will,
yes.
Q73 Jeff Ennis: Are you anticipating
the bill will appeal to all types of LEA or those in, say, an
urban setting or a rural setting? Are you hoping that the pilots
will come from a broad spectrum of different examples?
Mr Housden: I think it is important
that they do really, so that we have a proper range of learning.
We certainly know that across all the different types of authority
there are issues and problems which people have been pushing at
us to want to solve, so I would be surprised if we did not get
that full range reflected in the applications.
Q74 Jeff Ennis: Will the selection
process involve the departments selecting from a number of different
types of settings?
Mr Housden: Yes, we would certainly
like to do that.
Q75 Jeff Ennis: Given all these pitfalls
there may appear to be to local education in getting involved
in putting in a bid for pilot status, do you think there will
be enough LEAs coming forward of all the different types to meet
the 20?
Ms Jones: Yes. We have certainly
been in discussions with more than 20 LEAs. We have two which
have their plans already quite well formed, because it was things
they had been thinking about already and they have been able to
extend existing plans. I am not sure we will get up to the 20
by 2006 because of the local consultation process but I am cautiously
optimistic that if we have a second round in 2007 there will be
more coming on board. It rather depends how quickly we get the
legislation through.
Q76 Jeff Ennis: Have you had any
feedback from the Local Government Association about the draft
proposals?
Ms Jones: They are very positive.
We held a couple of conferences last week. They did them jointly
with us and spoke in support of the proposals.
Q77 Chairman: Have you any other
parallel, any precedent of pilots being offered with no cash inducements
to local authorities to participate? My memory is that usually
there is a carrot—indeed, a carrot and a stick. This is
unusual, in the sense that you are not offering very much of an
inducement to get involved in the pilots.
Mr Housden: I do not have a deeply
researched answer to this, but the answer is, yes, in at least
one instance, because we are currently doing a quite significant
pilot on a new pattern of school inspection. The Chief Inspector
announced "shorter, sharper, more focused school inspection"
to be piloted alongside a different relationship between the local
authority school improvement function and the individual schools.
We are piloting that in seven local authorities. There is no financial
inducement at all. There is quite a significant investment of
time, energy and resource required by the local authorities and
we have had many more than seven who want to participate. Why?
Because I think it responds to a real problem that they have and
a real opportunity, so people want to do it.
Q78 Chairman: It is a little bit
strained, that parallel, in my view. What worries me, and I hope
some of my colleagues, because we are all politicians and our
time frame is very limited to perhaps the next election and an
election after that, is that it does seem a long process. There
is a problem out there, there is real frustration. Schools do
not open in the ways in which people would like them to, school
transport is congesting the roads, we know all these problems
exist and yet this bill seems to offer some hope for something
perhaps in the next decade. A lot of us around this Committee
would want something a little faster. A bit of me, as I hear your
evidence, is saying, "Why on earth don't they just get on
with it and give some companies for partnership to use the technology
to appraise the system and move now rather than waiting for ten
years?" Do you in the Department sense a bit of the frustration
over there? I know there is a very nice ambience over there in
what I call the "Eden Project" but is there a sense
of urgency, of "Let's tackle this and get on with it rather
than waiting such a long time"? The climate could be very
much warmer by the time we get anything out of this.
Mr Housden: Very much so, really.
The bit that is potentially difficult and controversial to handle
at local level is the bit that is reflected in the bill which
is the capacity to charge parents who currently are receiving
free transport to school. One of the issues there is about the
extent to which the local scheme will protect parents who have
made their decisions about school choice and what-have-you on
the expectation that transport will be provided, hence the length
of the pilot schemes is important in all of this so that authorities
can, if they wish, work out those entitlements, so that people
will make school transfer decisions, for example, in the knowledge
that this scheme will apply. I think there is a range of considerations
like that, which took us to the notion that there should be a
pilot but that it needs some time to work through, and away from
the notion that says we should simply remove all of the constraints
and let people get on with it. I think the judgment on that course
would have been that perhaps a good number of authorities would
have made a good job of it and followed the guidance and done
well, but that one would worry about the authorities, even if
it was 10 or a dozen, where it was not done well—they were
not keen to do it, they were not ready to do it—and you
had parents experiencing significant difficulties or injustices
in the local scheme. I think that has been the area where we have
been cautious about the time scale, but the urgency through school
travel planning, through our work with the Department of Transport,
is exactly in the same place as you describe.
Q79 Chairman: But it would be nice
if this Committee could see that in parallel with the changes
in the pilots you actually gave a small amount of money to another
20 authorities, saying, "No change in the rules for you.
Work within the existing structure. Here is"—I do not
know—"£50,000 or £100,000 for joint partnership
work, to see how much you can improve in the short term in parallel."
It would give that immediacy to the departments concerned which
does not seem to come from this.
Mr Housden: We must take that
view back to ministers with your other comments. They have reached
a view about the relative priority of this in expenditure terms
which we have discussed a bit this morning. The essence of their
position is that there is more to go from the existing commitment
of public expenditure.
Chairman: I have been chairing this Committee
for three years. All the ministerial team has changed in that
time. Some of us would like to see change whilst we can hold a
minister to account. However, we will move on: Parents, Pupils
and Schools.
7 Note by witness: These figures form Annex
F of the Memorandum. Back
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