Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
WEDNESDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2003
PROFESSOR ANNE
WEST, PROFESSOR
JOHN FITZ
AND PROFESSOR
JOHN COLDRON
Q20 Jonathan Shaw: What effect do
admissions criteria have?
Professor West: The distance catchment
area is one area that John Fitz would be happy to talk about more.
As far as I am concerned, it does mean that children who live
in a particular area are likely to go to a school in that particular
area and they do not want to travel for half an hour or two hours
across the authority to some other school, so I think there are
other advantages of having a distance criterion so that children
are able to go to a school that is near where they live. I would
work on the assumption that must have advantages for the purposes
of social cohesion and minimising travel and environmental consequences
too, but one could debate that.
Professor Fitz: From the Local
Education Authority point of view there is much to be said for
catchment areas and proximity criteria. For example, and the Chairman
would know this, Cardiff goes along with the idea of local schools
for local children which is a perfectly admirable line to pursue.
From the Local Education Authority point of view it does have
the merit of being very fair. If you are in the area you have
priority at that school but it is also relatively easy to administer.
We now have geographical information systems which make it possible
to measure either the walking distance or as the crow flies, and
it is transparent. So those are considerable merits in any system.
The problem we are finding with catchment areas is they also then
follow housing markets, and you get the education market locking
in with the housing market and locking people into relatively
poor or relatively high performing schools, and it is very difficult
to get out of that. To move away from that you then have to think
about other things like transport costs, banding and so on, but
one of the big things we find with catchment areas is that it
is producing segregated systems. Cardiff is an interesting example
of that but there are others equally as segregated. By segregation
I mean the share the schools have of socially disadvantaged children
or relatively disadvantaged children compared with the other schools
around them, and catchment areas certainly both preserve segregation
and in a sense extend it into the future. You may have read last
week, for example, that house prices in certain parts of Reading
have been boosted by £30,000 or so and in Coventry it is
£15-20,000, so that is the problem, and what you get is segregation
in education arising from segregation in the housing market with
the two being very closely linked. It is very difficult to break
it down but if you have just invested an extra £20,000 in
a house within a catchment area you are clearly going to wish
to preserve the status of that school and the idea of a catchment
area, so that is where we stand on catchment areas.
Q21 Jonathan Shaw: So the Greenwich
ruling has exacerbated some of the problems in terms of parental
choice, and is not necessarily the panacea that some people painted?
Professor Fitz: Under the legislation
it has always been the case. In 1944 and then 1988 supported by
the Greenwich judgment parents have a right to express
a preference, and that has to be set alongside the Local Education
Authority's duty to be efficient in providing school places, so
there was always that balance and one of the ways of overcoming
that is by using catchment areas. In that sense, therefore, the
Greenwich judgment certainly promoted the idea that a parent
in Huddersfield could express a preference for a school in London—that
is what it says basically. Their chances of realising that preference,
of course, is constrained by all kinds of things, including local
oversubscription criteria and local admissions policies.
Professor Coldron: I think that
question is the most important one. That is the heart of the difficulty
about intakes and performance and of choice. One item that perhaps
has not been mentioned by either Anne or John is that local schools
increase parental satisfaction to some extent. There are quite
a lot of pressures on parents to want local schools. Security—they
do not want their children to be travelling too far. Cost. Wanting
to be within the community in which they live, and that is not
just middle class communities but also working class communities—so
there are quite a lot of pressures, not just about educational
criteria, that make parents want local schools. The problem, if
you think of it as a problem, is it maintains segregation. My
view is either you desegregate by having lots and lots of travel
subsidy and allowing people to move around, or you say, "No,
we go for local schools and somehow mitigate the issue of performance
and low performance and low performing schools". For me it
is the latter.
Professor West: I just want to
add to that and mention the fact that some Local Education Authorities
at a Local Education Authority level still use some form of banding
to try and get an academically balanced intake. The situation
is different with schools that are their own admission authorities,
but I think it is worth looking at that as a possible way to try
and reduce the segregation and I think that John Fitz has carried
out some work looking at the levels of segregation in areas where
there is banding, which I think he has written about.
Q22 Jonathan Shaw: That is what the
Kent secondary moderns would say that are their own admissions
authorities, I think, in order to try and get a more mixed income—or
should I say intake!
Professor Coldron: "Income"
is perhaps the right term, but can I say I do not think you need
the same criteria across the whole of the country. One needs to
do something about London and I think there it is going to have
to be an intricate set of measures—banding, catchment areas,
possibly federations of schools, a single admission authority
across the whole—all sorts of radical proposals, but an
intricate mix and interconnection of them. In Cumbria you do not
have to worry so much because segregation is going to occur and
you will not change that by subsidising travel because subsidising
40 miles of travel is not worth it.
Q23 Jeff Ennis: I wanted to respond
to what Professor Coldron said in terms of how influential the
home to school transport policy of an Local Education Authority
can be, because we saw an example in Birmingham last year which
is the biggest Local Education Authority in western Europe, and
they have the biggest network of home-to-school transport arrangements
which allows the free movement of pupils for quite long distances
across the city. Where you get Local Education Authorities that
have very differing admissions policies, would it not be true
to say that a counterbalance to that could possibly be having
a more extensive home-to-school transport policy to extend parental
choice?
Professor Coldron: It certainly
could be, and I think it could well be used in an integrated package
whose aim was to reduce the segregation between schools, yes,
as long as the aim of it was not simply parental choice for its
own sake but was part of a much more broad aim of reducing segregation
between schools. That would mean other things going on as well.
Q24 Jeff Ennis: Is it something that
Local Education Authorities should have more in the forefront
of their thinking, because I think in the present time it is very
much a back number, as it were?
Professor Coldron: I think they
should have it as one of the ingredients but they should have
lots of other ideas going on at the same time.
Professor Fitz: I think John is
right about that. I would also like to see some more equity in
the system as well because different rules apply to some sectors
in the schools and the Local Education Authority. The Local Education
Authority has a three mile limit and so on, but if you are talking
about a Welsh medium school where the language of instruction
is Welsh, you can travel further than that because that is your
closest Welsh medium school, or if you have a religiously affiliated
school and your closest school is more than three miles away then
you have subsidised transport which does not apply to the rest
of the authority, so there is a case for making that system more
equal. Taking the point further I think it is an interesting idea
that you float about subsidised public transport to increase choice
and encourage other things to happen, but then other things arise
from that. London, for example, which has a very dense network
of transport and dense network of schools because of population
density, also has a large number of appeals because parents then
have a realistic choice between a much larger range of secondary
schools. You do not find that in Camarthen, for example, where
there are vast distances between schools—you have one local
school—and the same would apply to Cumbria and parts of
Yorkshire and East Anglia and so on, and one would want to look
at that. Then you might want to put that alongside the cost of
appeals. If you are in the system where there are large numbers
of appeals because parents are not getting the schools that they
prefer, and that is the case in London, then that is a cost. You
are tying up a Local Education Authority officer for probably
weeks or months at a time and if you set that cost against more
transport then it is an interesting discussion to have. I think
transport is an interesting point.
Chairman: People never mention the environmental
costs of half the country churning round Birmingham, Manchester
and London.
Q25 Valerie Davey: As a sideline
on that, we would not have to adjust the traffic problems in Bristol
if we had the situation in half-term always. In half-terms and
the holidays the traffic flows in Bristol, but not in school termtime.
It is a really important factor and I think we have to recognise
it. I wanted to draw attention, however, to the elements in the
code which says that local admission arrangements contribute to
improving standards for all children. Who is holding the ring
for that one? It must be the Local Education Authorities, and
if it is going to be the Local Education Authorities, then where
does that leave the Greenwich judgment? That is now 13/14
years old, and what research has been done on the impact of Greenwich?
Anything?
Professor Fitz: We have some data
on the proportion of children going to out of borough schools,
but again that varies locally. In London it is going to be very
high—I have not done the figures in London—and elsewhere
it is negligible. I do not have any absolutely clear figures to
give you this morning but we have done work on that and it is
going to vary locally, as I say.
Q26 Valerie Davey: Professor Coldron,
you said something about different systems in different areas.
Would you agree that Greenwich is useful in London but
not elsewhere in the country?
Professor Coldron: Yes. As far
as I understand from the work I have seen, London is more or less
a market area. Sheffield might be a market area in itself, or
south of Sheffield, but in London, because of its transport arrangements,
people could theoretically go almost anywhere for a school. So
the best way of thinking about London is as a unitary market.
Q27 Valerie Davey: So somebody ought
to be looking at improving standards, or perhaps that is what
David Puttnam is trying to do now, but who do you estimate is
looking at this particular criterion and keeping that to the fore,
that all children are considered when we are looking at the admissions
policy?
Professor Coldron: I think it
is a very acute point that the only people who have all of the
children in mind within an area are the Local Education Authority
or, generalising it, a supra single admission authority body,
and in different areas, if you were going to find the most appropriate
supra individual admission authority body, you would come up with
different solutions. In Cumbria it would be county-wide, in Sheffield
it would be borough-wide, in London I do not know—it is
far too complex—but it is not at the level of the admission
authorities. We have to think a bit above that.
Professor West: Adding to the
Greenwich judgment point, it comes to the fore when you
have small Local Education Authorities, or even larger Local Education
Authorities, and you have a school on the border and it is important
from that point of view. Otherwise you could increase travel time
phenomenally and it would be considered unreasonable for a child
to have to travel three miles in one direction when, 400 metres
across the border, there is a school they could apply to. Given
that so much government money raised centrally goes through the
revenue support grant to local authorities it seems to be perfectly
reasonable to me that that should stay in place on financial grounds
as well as on reasonableness grounds, and that those children
should not be disadvantaged because they happen to live across
the border.
Q28 Valerie Davey: No, but nor should
the local children be disadvantaged when the academic parents,
or whoever, can play the system—we are coming back to other
things. Nobody was unreasonable prior to Greenwich in the
situation you describe; the difficulty came when it tipped the
balance to parental preference as against overall planning. It
was another factor in the weighting of the argument, and in certain
circumstances it has been to the detriment of not only the young
people but the school, and we have to recognise that.
Professor Fitz: Following that
line, you would want to say that the Greenwich judgment
has given rise to the hot spots of London, and people moving relatively
freely across administrative boundaries into local schools just
across the border gives rise to the problems we find, say, in
south London. That is true.
Q29 Mr Simmonds: I was very intrigued
by the answer you gave to Jonathan Shaw earlier. Surely selection
is a way, whether by aptitude or academic ability, of mixing up
people from different socio economic backgrounds, but from what
you were saying before that is not a solution you would consider?
Professor Fitz: No. On selective
schools by and large, if you look at schools across the country
in England and Wales, the figures we have vary enormously but
the proportion of children on free school meals is about 16% and
if you go to a selective school it is 2.3%. It is not mixed and
you find the same kinds of things with specialist schools. Language
colleges in our study have about 10% of students on free school
meals, and in other specialist schools it is probably 2 or 3%
below the national average, so those schools are not mixed. Socially
disadvantaged children do not appear in the same numbers there
as they appear in schools nationally.
Q30 Mr Simmonds: So if you cannot
do it by selection or whatever criteria you set down, how do you
break the problem that you have of children from socio economically
deprived households going to schools in those socio economically
deprived areas?
Professor Fitz: There are several
solutions we propose. Banding has been an effective way of doing
that. Here we are talking about the school mix, and some people
attach a great deal of importance to the school mix because it
has been argued in the past that, if you get a balanced intake
within schools then, broadly speaking, performance rises. Now,
this is 1970s data so we are going back a bit. You can achieve
that in a number of ways: one is banding but then we have been
talking about other things as well—things like improved
transport costs so it is cheaper for parents, especially
in difficult circumstances financially, to make a realistic choice
of schools outside their catchment area. The thing that Anne has
suggested is that you could make the funding formula for schools
different so they get more money if they take children on free
school meals than they would otherwise get under the present formula.
You could have council tax subsidies and so on—there are
lots of ways you could do it. Each of those are politically sensitive
I am sure, and you would need immense political will to do it.
Q31 Chairman: And the council tax
subsidy would do what?
Professor Fitz: Well, maybe you
could reduce council tax for people willing to move out of their
catchment area into another area. This is just an out-of-the-box
idea but you could do that, and there are ways of encouraging
people to use schools other than the local school.
Q32 Mr Simmonds: Coming on to selection,
what do you think is the educational rationale behind selection,
if there is any?
Professor Coldron: I do not think
there is much now. The evidence that is available shows that there
is either a very small educational gain or none at all; possibly
large social losses; and that differentiated systems by selection
tend, as the Pisa study shows, not to perform as well as less
segregated systems, so I do not think there is any educational
basis for selection although obviously there is a political basis
for it. There is not an admissions basis either because the present
situation makes admissions very difficult within areas and causes
a great deal more segregation.
Q33 Chairman: Do Professor Fitz and
Professor West share that view?
Professor Fitz: You can account
for much of the variation between selective schools and non-selective
schools by, again, looking at their intakes. That probably accounts
for about 85% of the variance between schools. It does not need
much to explain, by them being in a school where children of similar
abilities are being educated together. If you begin to do the
analysis, the socio-economic composition of the schools would
explain most of the variation between selective schools and non-selective
schools.
Q34 Chairman: Professor West, you
were rather bucking the system then when you nodded. For the record,
were you concurring with John Coldron's point?
Professor West: I was concurring.
I would also like to add something. The PISA results do seem to
be very clear in terms of the disadvantages of having a selective
system, as in the tripartite system that used to be in place in
this country with grammar schools, technical schools and secondary
modern schools. There is an equivalent system that operates in
Germany and there has been a lot of concern in Germany about the
outcomes of the PISA assessment. I think you said you have discussed
this previously. There are problems there. I think there are actually
very fundamental social problems too associated with selection—and
I am talking not so much about selection in the non-grammar schools,
as in the extreme situations which arise where you do have selection
across the whole of an LEA, where you do get some very, very high
performing schools alongside some very, very low performing schools.
I think there are social consequences there. The Northern Irish
evidence also supports that.
Professor Coldron: May I add one
small thing. We also have to consider selection and differentiation
within schools; that is, streaming, setting and so on. That too
is associated with lower educational attainment of the whole group
of students. If you reduce the intake segregation between schools,
my prediction would be that you would get a pressure from middle-class
parents for even greater in-school segregation, so there is no
free way of going ahead here. I think if we reduce intake segregation
we would have to watch the in-school segregation.
Q35 Mr Turner: I am intrigued, Chairman,
by the answers I am getting to these questions. Are you saying,
all three of you, from the evidence you have given today, that
actually you believe selection in any shape or form is damaging
to the education of pupils, and, therefore, if you had your way,
you would abolish selection in any shape or form in totality?
Professor Fitz: Yes.
Professor Coldron: Yes.
Professor West: Yes.
Mr Turner: That is hardly a balanced
view, is it, Chairman?
Valerie Davey: London, Cardiff, Sheffield.
Mr Turner: Having established that, let
me ask you—
Chairman: I must interrupt. We have invited
three very distinguished professors from very different institutions.
Whether we like or you like particular answers, I do not think
we should impugn the reputation of our witnesses.
Mr Turner: I was not suggesting that,
Chairman. If they thought that, I apologise.
Chairman: I know you were not. But I
just wanted to make that clear.
Q36 Mr Turner: May I ask then, one
further question, after you have informed the committee of that:
Has anybody of whom you are aware conducted any research on the
performance of those pupils who are actually successful in being
selected? Is their performance enhanced by being together with
other pupils who have been selected?
Professor Fitz: I can think of
one study, of which I did the first round, on the assisted places
schemes—I was a young researcher on that—back in the
1980s. A subsequent book out by Sally Power, Geoff Whitty and
Tony Edwards has followed those children through, who are now
about 25/30 and in the workplace. That tracked quite a few of
them through from school to university to the jobs they now have.
My reading of this is that there was a slight advantage to those
children who had been assisted place students but for a variety
of reasons. However, there were also some casualties from that—these
things are not as linear as one might think. In terms of the degrees
they obtained and the jobs they now occupy, there seemed to be
some advantage, but that has to be set against the casualties.
That book needs to be read really, quite thoroughly, I think.
There is other work.
Professor Coldron: Yes, of earlier
witnesses to this Committee, Ian and Sandie Schagen. I will be
corrected if I get it wrong, but their results were that overall
there was a very small—very small—element in favour
of selective systems. It was very tiny: statistically significant
but not very significant in other ways. But for one group, the
less able children—not the highest fliers within the cohort
but the less able—if they were in a comprehensive school
they would do less work than if they were in a grammar school.
That was quite a significant difference. So there was one cohort
where it actually benefited that particular group. I am trying
to say that these are small, quite small, effects—very small
effects—and of course that last one is probably—and
Ian and Sandy I think suggest this—connected with intake;
in other words, the fact that these people are in the company
of other children of very high ability and therefore that pulls
them up.
Chairman: I think you have given some
very revealing answers to Andrew's questions. Andrew, do you want
to ask any more?
Q37 Mr Turner: The only other area
I wanted to explore was the aptitude tests. Certain secondary
schools are now being allowed to select 10% of their pupils by
aptitude. What impact do you think this is going to make on the
education of those pupils and of the totality of pupils at those
particular secondary schools?
Professor West: This is speculation:
I would not have thought it would make a vast amount of difference
because those young people would have been selected on that basis.
We do not know what additional provision they may or may not have
in the schools concerned. As I understand it, the aim of the policy
was to give opportunities for young people who would not necessarily
have those opportunities to study that specialism in another school.
My concern really is: Who are those young people who are being
selected on the basis of ability/aptitude in the subject area?
I do not think we know the answer to that question yet, except
on the basis of inference and deduction when looking at some of
the admission criteria which are used by some schools, which really
make reference to having achieved a certain level in music examinations
and so on. It has to be said that the schools' adjudicator has
been very proactive in this area and it is likely to change—which
as far as I am concerned is a good thing. It is likely to try
to make sure that there is more equality of opportunity for young
people if it can be determined that they have an aptitude for
some particular area. It will be somewhat fairer and more children
from different social groups will actually have an opportunity
of getting places on that basis. That rather begs the question
of whether it is a good thing or not, but that is a different
question.
Q38 Mr Turner: Presumably, in reference
to your answer to my earlier question, you are against allowing
some secondary schools to select by aptitude up to 10%.
Professor West: It is making it
a school choice as opposed to a parent choice. There are various
reasons why I am not happy with it, but that is one of them. It
is a matter of who is actually being selected as a result of the
selective policies. If we know that it was children who had special
educational needs, who had medical and social needs, if we knew
that they too were having an equal opportunity of getting into
some of these sought-after schools, then I think one could feel
more confident. The concern is that a lot of schools which have
their own admission authority appear not to be giving that level
of priority to some of these children who might be considered
harder to teach. That is behind all of this. There is a social
justice side to it.
Q39 Mr Turner: The problem is the
people being selected, not the selection process itself. That
is what you just said.
Professor West: I think the two
go hand in hand.
Professor Fitz: The figures are
fairly clear. The specialist schools are selecting a student population
which is different from the schools around them. It is a more
slightly advantaged population. The second question, then, is:
Do those students do better in specialist schools than they do
in the schools around them? The answer is yes and no. Generally,
if you take into account the socio-economic composition of the
specialist schools and the schools around them, you can probably
account for any differences by a difference in the socio-economic
composition. In our study we found specialist schools that do
better than the schools around them and we found specialist schools
that do worse. That is where we stand. Again, it is really down
to the intake, to who comes in. That explains a considerable amount
of the variance. Other academic researchers find in fact that
there is a school effect, but it is not one we have found, I think.
That is where we stand.
Professor West: There is something
I would like to add on that and that is that although specialist
schools do select about three times more than non-specialist schools,
the biggest effect is whether schools are their own admission
authority or not. The schools that are their own admission authority
are 27 times more likely to select a proportion of pupils on the
basis of ability and aptitude in a subject area than are schools
that are not their own admission authority. I do not think I have
made it as clear as I should have done. My big concern is having
so many schools that are responsible for admission to their school.
I think there is a whole range of strategies, from the hardest
strategy that Professor Coldron is advocating to a softer strategy
that would be improving regulation, which could actually try to
ensure there is a more even playing field—I think that is
the best way of putting it—between controlled schools on
the one hand and schools that are foundation and voluntary aided
on the other.
Professor Fitz: If I could add
one further point there. I think Anne has made a very important
distinction between specialist schools which are their own admissions
authorities. It would be possible for an LEA to have a specialist
schools programme as way of overcoming social segregation between
schools. You could actually think that through as a way of addressing
some of the issues that I think we have raised this morning.
Professor West: Diversity Pathfinders.
I think department officials would be able to say more about that.
Professor Coldron: In the new
Code of Practice, selection for specialism is considered an over-subscription
criterion. That means that it only works to equalise intakes if
there are no schools that are over-subscribed, because they are
not selecting on that basis. But, of course, if you already have
a situation where there is segregation between schools and over-subscribed
and under-subscribed schools, then having every school a specialist
school is not going to help.
Chairman: We have to move on. Kerry Pollard
has been waiting patiently.
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