Examination of Witnesses (Questions 640
- 659)
MONDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2003
MR DAVID
BELL, MRS
SHEILA BROWN
AND MR
NICK FLIGHT
Q640 Jeff Ennis: Following this particular
thing, and I accept what David has already said about every school
being judged on its own merits in terms of performance and we
cannot generalise too much, but we have already heard evidence
that of the top 200 state schools the average number of pupils
on free school meals at those top 200 state secondary schools
is three per cent and the national average is 17%. We do not have
figures for the bottom 200 state schools, but I guess, off the
top of my head, I would be safe in saying that the number of children
on free school meals in those schools would be a lot higher than
the 17%. Looking at admissions policies and trying to make every
school in the country a good school, should LEAs and other admissions
authorities be looking at trying to establish some sort of federation
system to try to address these issues or a fair banding system?
Are there any models of that sort which you think we could recommend
to try to make every school a good school? Basically, are pupils
on free school meals being discriminated against in terms of the
admissions authority and what can authorities do in looking at
federations of schools or fair banding systems to try to ameliorate
that situation?
Mr Bell: There is no evidence
that pupils on free school meals are being discriminated against,
although I would not dispute the data you suggest. I have to repeat
the point that we should not ever get to a situation where we
say, if pupils are of this background or that background they
cannot achieve. From my perspective that is the road to ruin and
we should always have high ambitions. I was very interested that
you picked up the federation point. I might have said the last
time I was here that we are probably in some virgin territory
when it comes to federation arrangements, schools working together,
some very exciting and very interesting examples of that happening.
We just have to wait and see. What it is really important is the
kind of principle which underpins that approach and that is all
schools being responsible for all pupils. That is a powerful,
powerful argument in an area where schools, however successful
or not so successful they are, do recognise that they do have
a responsibility to other schools. That might be evidenced by
offering courses to students from more than one school, it might
be evidenced by students working together, teachers swapping over,
school management teams working together. That is a very powerful
move, but it is early days and this might be an issue of federations
and schools working together that the Committee would return to
and I am sure Ofsted will be looking at that very carefully.
Q641 Chairman: It is a systemic failure
in many cases, is it not? When we went to Birmingham, the fact
of the matter was that when you get to an inner city school it
was not that every school had planned for a particular inner school
to have the rough end of the deal, but you knew there was a school
with excess capacity and you knew that school was going to get
pupils who had been pushed out of other schools for poor behaviour,
you knew that school was going to receive more special educational
needs pupils, you knew that if there were political refugees settled
in that city they were likely to be put into that school because
it had capacity. We went to one school and in the middle of term
there were 20 families applying to join that school on that day
and the turnover was such in that one school that if you add all
those up it is not a conspiracy, it is a systemic failure in one
way, is it not?
Mr Bell: It would be hard to argue
against that. We can all cite examples of schools where all these
factors seem to conspire to make circumstances particularly difficult.
One observation I would make is that some of those factors you
described do go beyond the school gates, that they are not beyond
the influencing of the local authority and other agencies. For
example, if you take what you mentioned about refugee families,
there are actions which can be taken, as we reported recently,
which will assist. You are absolutely right to say that it becomes
harder and harder, the more of those factors that come together.
It does not seem to me then to be a case that such schools are
hopeless and nobody can do anything about them, it just illustrates
the fact that some of the interventions have to come from outside
the school and not just from inside the school itself.
Q642 Chairman: To try to be an honest
politician, I have to tell you that was George Dixon's school
I was using which has been extremely successful in turning itself
round and the head got a knighthood last year. Was it not you,
or your immediate predecessor, who said to the Committee that
they believed schools could only achieve so much, that it was
80% external influences like family support and 20% the school.
Was it you?
Mr Bell: I think I might have
said that, but that is not to cap the ambitions and aspirations,
it was to make the point that successful schools work in a partnership
with parents and others from outside the school gate. The example
you cited illustrates that it is not impossible even for schools
facing the most challenging circumstances to succeed. It is a
reality that it is harder for many schools to succeed when those
different factors come together. We always have this balance to
strike. On the one hand I do not want to imply that schools can
sort everything out for themselves, irrespective of what is going
on outside, yet on the other hand, we must avoid the danger of
consigning some children, some families, some schools to the scrap
heap and saying there is nothing we can do within the school for
them. That is in some ways an even greater danger.
Q643 Jeff Ennis: I was going to compare
special educational needs children and the fact that a great weighting
has been put on children in care being considered for school admissions.
Would it be possible to have some sort of weighting system for
schools which were actually not taking a fair proportion of children
with special educational needs and how could we address that?
Mr Bell: That is a very interesting
issue and to some extent the Government opened this issue up in
its recent policy paper on primary education, Excellence and
Enjoyment, where it said that there is a perception abroad
that if you are a school which is taking active steps to include
children with special educational needs, somehow you are penalised,
in particular in relation to performance tables. I think that
was a recognition of a complex issue. It is not one of these ones
which is easy. You could say let us not include children with
special educational needs in any account of how the school is
doing, because that might be fairer. On the other hand, that might
be deeply damaging, if we imply that somehow children who have
special educational needs are not capable of achieving. That is
a really difficult one, but it is encouraging and I am very pleased
to see that the Government will be opening up a consultation on
that issue: how do we best account for children with special needs,
in a sense to incentivise schools to admit all children irrespective
of their needs?
Q644 Jeff Ennis: I do not want to
put words into your mouth, but from the responses you have already
given, it appears to me that you feel because it is such a complex
issue there needs to be some sort of central control mechanism
to some extent. Whether that should be through the LEA or perhaps
through these admission forums, which are only just becoming established,
if issues like the ones I have raised to do with free school meals
and special educational needs are not sorted out on a fair and
equitable basis within an area, is there a need to beef up the
existing role within LEAs or admission forums?
Mr Bell: It is always a difficult
one in some ways. You encourage me to be bold in what I say but
equally I have to take account of the reality as it is. For a
range of other reasons, not least those related to school autonomy,
we will not go back and probably should not go back to a system
where everything was done by the man or woman in the centre, wherever
the centre is. However, we can move from a situation where it
is every school for itself, to a situation where, through local
admissions fora and other bodies and ways of working, we get this
expectation that all schools have a contribution to make to greater
education. It is a bit of a blind alley then to say let us go
back to central planning or central control of school admissions.
That is not going to happen, as far as I can see, in the short
term and we must not divert our efforts from making the system
we have now work.
Q645 Jeff Ennis: It appears to me
that you feel the actual role of LEAs in terms of the current
admissions system is about right then.
Mr Bell: Our evidence would support
that. Where LEAs take their work with other admissions authorities
seriously, it can work well, yes. Equally, there are points for
the future for LEAs to improve that, not just LEAs, actually other
admissions authorities. It is really important to stress the point
that we do not just have the one admissions authority. In lots
of places we have a number of admissions authorities. Everyone
has a responsibility to make this work.
Q646 Mr Pollard: I want to ask Nick
Flight, as an auditor, whether the cost of appeals has been thought
of. In my area we have hundreds of appeals every year, it costs
an arm and a leg and it raises expectations. Could I ask whether
30 should be the maximum class size at any time, as we have done
with primary school class sizes? That seems to have worked quite
well and it would stop many of the appeals and bring costs down
and that would mean more money going into front-line education.
Mr Flight: Limiting class sizes
in secondary schools is a much, much bigger issue than limiting
class sizes in years one to two. We have not done any research
as to what the practicalities are about doing that. I am sure
your point about the cost of appeals is absolutely pertinent.
It is an expensive business. We do not have figures about that
kind of detail on LEA expenditure. I believe you were asking the
two directors, who were themselves unclear about the actual cost
of appeals within their own education authorities. We have not
collected that across the board.
Q647 Mr Pollard: Could you look at
it?
Mr Flight: It would be interesting
to know exactly how expensive this was.
Chairman: Will you think about it and
write to us?[3]
Q648 Jonathan Shaw: I want to touch
briefly on organisational change and parental preference, grasping
the nettle to close a popular school. You give examples of where
you see good practice, councils, local authorities being proactive
and taking difficult decisions. Obviously other authorities do
not do that for a variety of reasons which we understand, political
reasons, popularity; it is a very painful process closing a school,
allowing schools to wither on the vine, which does happen. Can
you tell the Committee whether that is commonplace?
Mr Bell: It is now less common,
partly because of what we were saying earlier about the drive
to remove surplus places. I think, for the reasons which Nick
cited around this 10% figure, that it has concentrated the minds
of LEAs and some more critical judgments which we have made about
LEAs recently have been related to places where the nettle has
not been grasped and it is clearly having an impact in terms of
how money is well used. It is less common. You have rightly highlighted
the great difficulties in any situation of closing a school. I
cannot recall whether it is in this report or another we have
published—
Q649 Jonathan Shaw: A school in East
Brighton was given as an example to this Committee.
Mr Bell: Even when you close a
school which is apparently unpopular, there is nothing more designed
to galvanise public support than a proposal for closure and that
is just a painful, painful business.
Q650 Jonathan Shaw: Should popular
schools be required to expand to meet demand?
Mr Bell: I do not have any problem
in principle with popular schools being allowed to expand, but
of course that cannot be unlimited as far as I would see; just
practicalities would say whether they can be allowed to expand.
There is also an issue which is not often highlighted as much
as it might be: is there a tipping point where the very reasons
that people have chosen a school and it has become popular are
then lost when it gets to a size beyond which nobody ever intended
it to be? That is a practical issue. I just go back to the point
we made in the report: no problem in principle with popular schools
being used and expanded as part of our concerted school improvement
strategy, but not if it means other schools being allowed to wither
on the vine, withering on the vine in personal terms, when you
think of the children and young people who have to continue to
be educated in such schools.
Q651 Jonathan Shaw: If local authorities
are so keen to make these strategic decisions, have local authorities
sufficient powers to make decisions at an appropriate pace so
the process is not too long and drawn out?
Mrs Brown: Our findings of this
last year's inspections were particularly interesting because
over half of the LEAs we inspected this year were graded less
than unsatisfactory in their first cycle of inspections. There
are some key areas of improvement, one of them being around the
leadership of senior officers and elected members and the speed
and security of decision making which have significantly improved.
We are finding that LEAs are much better now at making the key
decisions and making those quickly, compared with what they were
able to do in the first cycle. Our view would be that the powers
are there and they are just much better at using them. In terms
of political leadership, we are seeing the corporate activity
of the LEA within the wider council has been more about community
leadership, which comes back to some of the points members of
the Committee were raising about a sense of having this shared
responsibility across all the council's activities for the children,
young people and families in their area. The decisions made within
the LEA can have a significant impact on other services of the
council and, equally, things like housing have an impact on what
the LEA is able to do.
Jonathan Shaw: If you close a school
it obviously impacts on a community.
Q652 Paul Holmes: We have talked
about the problem that at one end you have parental choice and
you have some schools selecting covertly or overtly. At the other
extreme you have the schools which lose out. In paragraph 51 of
your report, you talk about the schools which become sink schools
and go into a spiral of decline; because they have spare places
they must take all the pupils nobody wants and therefore they
get worse and worse. You then say in paragraphs 55 and 56 that
sometimes you just perhaps should not shut these schools anyway
because you say that closing the school does not enhance a disadvantaged
community. How do you square that circle, that if a school is
into a spiral of decline, then the community it is in the middle
of will be even worse if it loses the school? What is the answer
to that? What do you recommend?
Mr Bell: There is no straightforward
answer to that. This is an issue interestingly which plays out
in both the urban and rural settings because the argument is often
advanced in relation to rural schools that if you close the school
you are going to have an enormous impact on the rest of the community.
I do not think that it is easy to square the circle on this one.
There are some circumstances, and local authorities do not do
this lightly, but they have decided that everything else has not
worked and it might be better to educate children just slightly
further away from the local community. Equally, there are cases,
and I visited schools and I am sure members of this Committee
have visited schools, where everyone said that school was a goner,
it was never going to recover and then something happens, perhaps
a new head teacher, new sense of energy and vision around the
school and you do not recognise it five years later; not even
five years, three years later it can be a very different place.
It is really, really difficult and any local authority which is
making such decisions is trying always to weigh up those factors.
To be very honest with you, I do not think local authorities have
an easy answer, there is no simple answer to this one.
Q653 Chairman: What about the Archbishop
Tennyson answer, that they had special permission to take the
40 above average, 40 average and 20 below? The head told us that
turned the school round. Is that not a format? Is that not a system
you approve of as Ofsted?
Mr Bell: Schools will sometimes
say to you that their chances for improvement were enhanced when
they had a more balanced intake, but I know from schools, even
some I visited very recently, with exactly the same pupils, exactly
the same intake of pupils, but the school has just been transformed.
What the school has done in a sense is grow its own: it has actually
developed better the characteristics, the attributes of the students
who are there and made them achieve much more than they ever thought
of achieving. It is not a panacea to say all you have to do is
engineer the admissions to bring about school improvement. There
are ways in which schools can improve without changing the admissions
or changing the intake. Equally, as we have acknowledged, sometimes
schools get beyond the point of recovery and then the decision
of closure may well be the right one.
Q654 Paul Holmes: It might be interesting
to get an Audit Commission comment on this one. If you are a parent
and you are in a disadvantaged community and your local school
is failing for whatever reason, you have a bit of a problem. Because
you live in a disadvantaged community you are probably not that
well off, but if you want to send your child to a school some
distance away, which is seen as successful for whatever reason,
you have to pay the transport costs yourself. Two thirds of LEAs
will pay for children to go miles away to a faith school, but
no local education authority will pay for children to go miles
away to the specialist school which suits them or whatever. If
specialist schools are to have any meaning, LEAs should be paying
for kids to be going miles in different directions, passing each
other to go to the sports college or language college or whatever.
Equally, surely, in terms of fairness and opportunity, why are
we paying for one group of children to go 10 or 15 miles to a
faith school but not for other groups of children to go 10 or
15 miles to the a school that their parents would choose for them?
Mr Flight: The transport costs
for LEAs are a really significant element in their education budget
and the way in which they attempted to deal with that under quite
severe financial constraints was to comply with their legal obligations.
You draw attention to what is a real tension for LEAs in that
to make a reality of parental preference for all parents, regardless
of their income, would require considerable additional expenditure
on school transport, which is a political choice, which it has
not been possible for LEAs to take. It is quite true, that to
make a reality of parental preference for everybody, regardless
of income, would require considerable expenditure.
Q655 Chairman: Have you assessed
Sir Peter Lample's ideas for introducing the American style school
bus?
Mr Bell: We have just had a brief
opportunity to look at his evidence. It looked very interesting
but we have not had a chance to comment.
Q656 Valerie Davey: The City Technology
Colleges had enough money to do their own buses. Would you suggest
that if a school thought it was important enough, they would perhaps
have to use some of that funding to get children to their school?
Is it legal?
Mr Bell: As I understand it—and
I will stand corrected—I think that school governors have
the freedom to deploy their budgets in the interests or to the
ends of the school. Schools' governors may in some circumstances
say a group of their students is finding it very difficult to
get to school and they will put on transport for them. That is
an option, but presumably that is a local version of what Nick
Flight just described as the choices you have to make in a time
when budgets are tight.
Q657 Mr Chaytor: On the question
of league tables and admissions, if it is misleading, as you argue,
to use pupil intake as an excuse for a school being in the lower
quartile of the league tables, is it not equally misleading to
deny the impact of pupil intake as an explanation for a school
being in the upper quartile of the league tables?
Mr Bell: I would not want to draw
an absolute connection, is the point I am making.
Q658 Mr Chaytor: In your anxiety
not to draw an absolute connection, do you feel you are being
led to underestimate the reality of the impact? It is the 80/20
admissions. Where is the balance in a school's position on the
intake between the value added by the school and the nature of
the pupil intake.
Mr Bell: It is an important point
we would stress through inspection, if I may just highlight that.
We would want to use a variety of measures to judge the effectiveness
of a school.
Q659 Mr Chaytor: In your inspection
framework you do not consider a school's admissions policy.
Mr Bell: We do not consider the
admissions policy, but increasingly we are considering the added
value offered by the school. In the sense that one knows the starting
point of the pupils, notwithstanding how the pupils got there
via the admissions system, you are then in a position to judge
the effectiveness of the school. I think that will be increasingly
important information and it is not to deny the connection between
deprivation and achievement; that is well documented. It is equally
not to make an excuse of it because there are some schools serving
very deprived communities which are doing an absolutely cracking
job in offering their youngsters a really first-class education.
3 Note by Witness: The main direct costs are
those of staff time in two areas: education officers, with particular
responsibility for admissions, and legal officers. In both cases
the time spent on, and therefore the cost of, work on admission
appeals is a small proportion of their overall work and is not
separately quantified in national returns. It is not, therefore,
currently possible to estimate in any meaningful way the overall
cost across the country of administering admissions appeals. However,
these costs are themselves only part of the picture. There may
be additional costs, for example, in translation facilities and
time spent by other staff, such as education welfare officers.
Significant unquantified costs also include those incurred by
parents and children in terms of time, travel and sometimes legal
expenses, as well as the cost to schools in terms of enquiries
and following up on pupil placements. Back
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