Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220
- 239)
WEDNESDAY 22 OCTOBER 2003
DR BRYAN
SLATER AND
MR ROBERT
DOUGLAS
Q220 Mr Turner: Could I ask Dr Slater
a question about his paper where he describes the current system
as purely market-driven?
Dr Slater: Not perhaps purely
but the fundaments of the system are based on parental choice
and children being assigned a sum of money. The fundaments of
a market underpin the arrangements for school admissions, yes.
Q221 Mr Turner: You have answered
my question because I think you have accepted that it is not purely
market-driven.
Dr Slater: Perhaps that was not
appropriate.
Q222 Mr Turner: May I read something
from Public Finance, and it is very brief: Inner city comprehensives
tend to fail mainly because they have to cope with children who
suffer from poverty, an inadequate grasp of English or disrupted
home backgrounds or all three. Do you agree with that?
Mr Douglas: That is a very loaded
question. No, I do not think I do agree entirely. It does impact
upon inner city comprehensives and I certainly think in Leeds
we can see some effect of that, but what those inner city comprehensives
are doing with a difficult client group is actually very good.
I do not think we are able to take enough account of that. The
system as it presently stands does not support that. It is a very
loaded question and I would not entirely agree with it. There
is an impact in terms of national targets, but the work that goes
on in those schools is of an extremely high quality and, by and
large, is serving that client group very well indeed.
Dr Slater: I very much agree with
that. Some schools have a much more difficult job than other schools
to reach national targets. If failure is defined in relation to
those national targets rather than in terms of how well a school
is doing in its circumstances, then the effect is clear. What
I hope and what I work for is a system in which every school is
a good school because I think every child is entitled to go to
a good school. I do not believe it is necessary for some schools
to fail and for other schools to be good. We can have a system
in which all schools are good schools. We may need to be more
subtle in the way in which we judge schools as to whether they
are failing or not, in their circumstances.
Chairman: We move on to school admissions
authorities.
Q223 Valerie Davey: Mr Slater, you
said that within your authority there were 16 other admission
authorities. Can you tell us how you have co-ordinated that approach
and whether this increases the likelihood of schools choosing
and having their preference rather than parents, or whether that
is largely a factor of over-subscription?
Dr Slater: I will give you a very
straightforward answer: and it is because in an authority like
Norfolk we have very widely geographically distanced schools.
Some of those schools are 50 miles distant one from the other.
We have informal local arrangements. Our co-ordination of admission
arrangements under the code will happen on a geographic basis,
so that we take account of local context and so that what we are
doing is working with groups of schools. The way in which we need
to do that is slightly different in the proportion of schools
which are their own admission authorities—for example, in
Great Yarmouth, all but one of the high schools are their own
admissions authority. That is a very singular context in which
to work. The way in which admissions are made, of course, is in
relation to over-subscription. If a school is not over-subscribed
in the first place, the admission over-subscription rules do not
apply. What you tend to get in an urban context is that popular
schools are always over-subscribed and unpopular schools are never
over-subscribed. It is then that the effect of the individual
school's own over-subscription criteria clicks in and has an effect
on the system. This is one of the reasons why it is hard for schools
which are seen as unpopular to climb out of that; they are always
in a situation where they are at the end of the line when it comes
to everybody having had their own over-subscription criteria applied
to the system. Does that help?
Q224 Valerie Davey: It does but in
the context that you have clearly set out—and we are looking
for a way in which we either change the law or use best practice—have
you either good advice for other authorities or are you saying
that this aspect of it does not work until you change?
Dr Slater: I think we have already
said, in a way, that you can go so far down the road of securing
an equitable system and a system where every school has a chance
to be a good school; but you cannot guarantee it. However well
and however cordial your arrangements are with schools that are
their own admission authorities, they remain their own admission
authorities.
Q225 Valerie Davey: Could I ask whether
Leeds has a different experience in this same context of how many
other admission authorities you are working with within Leeds,
and then the effect of it?
Mr Douglas: It is really the voluntary-aided
sector.
Q226 Valerie Davey: The seven?
Mr Douglas: There are seven, two
of which are not particularly popular voluntary-aided schools.
I do not think the impact is as great in Leeds because we do not
have foundation schools. It is still a question of certain schools
remaining popular and over-subscribed and other schools remaining
under-subscribed, and that cycle continues. Parents will preference
the voluntary-aided sector because they perceive it to be better.
That is a difficult one to determine. Within co-ordinated arrangements,
we are talking with the diocesan authorities about how they seek
to establish the validity of a parent's preference in terms of
their religious preference.
Q227 Valerie Davey: Do either of
you have an admissions forum? I admit that, seeing the context
here, it is the first time of this for me. I do not have any experience
of an admission forum. Do either of you work with them and, if
so, have they been beneficial, and should the rest of us know
more about them?
Mr Douglas: We have an admissions
forum. Personally, I think it could be a lot stronger than it
is.
Q228 Valerie Davey: Can you tell
us a bit about it for those of us who have no direct experience
of that?
Mr Douglas: The admissions forum
is an independent group, independent of the local education authority,
and has been established to determine on particularly contentious
admission issues. If there is disagreement between admission authorities,
the admissions forum is a body where that problem can go. The
admissions forum will then make some form of judgment on that
and seek to broker an effective partnership. They are potentially
very useful. Certainly, I am very happy to work with an admissions
forum but I would like it to be a strong body, one that does have
clout and power effectively to determine admission disputes.
Q229 Valerie Davey: Are you saying
it does not at the moment?
Mr Douglas: I do not think it
does at the moment, no.
Q230 Valerie Davey: Dr Slater, can
we ask for your experience as well.
Dr Slater: We are just establishing
it now, as a result of the Code of Practice, in relation the 2004
admission round which we are just entering. We will be having
four informal local versions of this because of our geography,
but, yes, they will work in that way. They are a step forward.
But they can go only so far: they do not actually, in the end,
have teeth.
Q231 Valerie Davey: I have two supplementaries
specifically on that. Will they in time, do you think, determine
or give further influence to changes in admissions policy? Secondly,
do they work cross-border, between local authorities.
Mr Douglas: Other authorities
send representatives to other authority forums. For example, in
Leeds we have a representative from North Yorkshire who attends
our forum. I do not think at the present time, in the way that
they are constituted, they have any specific power to change admissions
policies. I think that would be a difficult area for them to stray
into because it is a function of the elected local council to
set the admissions policy. But certainly I think they should have
a role in advising on the effectiveness of an admissions policy
and how it is operating within an area.
Dr Slater: Yes, very much the
same.
Valerie Davey: Thank you.
Q232 Jonathan Shaw: Dr Slater, Mr
Douglas, if you were a head teacher of a school that was not popular—both
of you have described such schools, both of you have those within
your responsibilities—and the local education authority,
the main admission authority, kept on saying, "Because you
have some surplus places: you have got to take this child, you
have got to take this child, you have got to take this child,"
and so it went on, and the school then became more unpopular,
the behaviour got worse, standards went down, recruitment became
more difficult, retention became more problematic—all those
things—would you think, "I've tried my level best to
talk to the local education authority but they keep doing this
to me. They are really not interested," and might you be
tempted to think, "The only way I can get round this, to
bring a bit more fairness into the system, so that some of the
other schools within the area take some of the difficult, challenging
children, is to become a foundation school, become my own admissions
authority"? To bring up the drawbridge, effectively, saying,
"This is my last stand. This is all I can do to bring a bit
more stability, to bring a bit more of a mixed intake, to give
parents out there some confidence that this school is not one
which takes all the troublesome kids."
Dr Slater: You are right, that
is a natural way for someone to think. Could I go back to the
situation in one urban area in my own authority where every secondary
school did become a foundation school except one, which heroically
withstood all those pressures and all those temptations in order
that there was a place where we could find a school place for
local youngsters. But people make their own choice, do they not,
as to how they behave within the framework of the law that we
have? You have to take a view in these matters, in my own personal
view, about whether the system is for the children or not. If
the system is for the children, then we have to have arrangements
where we can secure a good school place for every child. Some
of the things about which we have given evidence this morning
are based on knowledge of circumstances where that is extremely
difficult, precisely because people have been put in the position
over the years that you describe.
Mr Douglas: I do not really have
anything to add to that. I think it would be an entirely natural
reaction. It would be something to consider if you were put in
that position. And it is tremendously difficult for some schools.
Without a doubt, some schools, certainly within Leeds, are suffering
as a result of that constant influx of children, partly because
of the area they serve and the nature of the child who is that
little bit more challenging, so even a straightforward admission
or in-year admission can cause difficulty. There are certainly
two or three, and possibly four, schools in Leeds where that is
now a real problem and those schools are suffering as a result
of it.
Q233 Jonathan Shaw: Where does it
end with those schools in Leeds that you are talking about? Do
you just sort of bump along and do the best you can?
Mr Douglas: We are trying very
hard to engage with those schools to give them perhaps a little
bit of breathing space and holding off from admitting the more
challenging children and seeking to admit them to other schools.
We are engaged in that discussion, we are actively working with
our community of schools to try to get some equity into this and
to look at what other strategies are available. One of the things
at which we are looking is trying to develop Key Stage 3 and Key
Stage 4 Intervention and Assessment Centres where children who
are exhibiting challenging behaviour can go, so they are not excluded
from school and they do not become an admission issue.
Q234 Jonathan Shaw: In terms of children
excluded from school, what is your experience where a child is
placed in a school because that is the only available place, so
they are effectively from out of an area or another estate—which
brings its own problems? Have you experienced the likelihood of
those particular children staying put at that school? Or do they
just abscond? This is certainly what heads of schools say to me:
"They are placed here, they are here for a week, the kids
from such and such estate soon work out they are not from that
area and that creates some confrontation. This is a child who
has a whole series of problems anyway, so they are off. Within
a week, I will not see them again."
Mr Douglas: That does happen,
but conversely where a child is taken out of their local circumstance
and the influences that that local circumstance may have upon
them, sometimes they are actually successful in a school that
is not in their area. So it does work the other way.
Q235 Jonathan Shaw: I appreciate
that.
Dr Slater: Absolutely the same
experience.
Q236 Jonathan Shaw: Do your authorities
both have a register of all the children? Do you have a central
register of all the children in your LEA area?
Dr Slater: Yes.
Q237 Jonathan Shaw: You do. And you
know where every child is.
Dr Slater: We think we do. And
that is the problem.
Q238 Jonathan Shaw: Mr Douglas?
Mr Douglas: I would say we think
we do, as well.
Q239 Jonathan Shaw: Do you think
that is a similar pattern across the country?
Mr Douglas: I suspect it probably
is.
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