UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 509-i
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
Education and Skills Committee
Draft School Transport Bill
Wednesday 31 March 2004
MR PETER HOUSDEN, MS PENNY JONES and MR PETER OPENSHAW
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 107
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Education and Skills Committee
on Wednesday 31 March 2004
Members present
Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr David Chaytor
Jeff Ennis
Valerie Davey
Mr Nick Gibb
Paul Holmes
Helen Jones
________________
Memorandum submitted by Department for Education and Skills
and Department for Transport
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Peter Housden, Director General, Schools and Ms Penny Jones, Divisional Manager, School Transport, Safety and Independent Education Division, Department for Education and Skills, and Mr Peter Openshaw, Head of Bus Partnership and Regulation Branch, Buses and Taxis Division, Department for Transport, examined.
Q1 Chairman: We welcome you to the Committee on the Draft School Transport Bill. We are very interested to learn something about how the Department sees it, and the way in which it will unravel or proceed, given that this is a Bill that is almost unique in that there is so little detail in it. It is the Committee's job to investigate. The Committee is very interested in this, in terms of its traditional remit and our increasing remit in relation to responsibilities for children right across the piece, which makes this of greater significance. Some of the questions will be about how far this Bill will enable us to look at a very comprehensive way of addressing the movement of children across local education and counterparties. What is the origin of the Bill? What is the inspiration for the Bill?
Mr Housden: The legislation that currently governs school transport, as you know, is very long-standing. We have seen in recent years a number of movements, particularly about patterns of travelling, about congestion, about lengths of journeys to school lengthening, and about the numbers of youngsters travelling by car increasing significantly. That has been an issue for public policy for a few years now, and those trends have been apparent. What has been encouraging for us and ministers is that we have seen the success of school travel plans where, with the Department for Transport, we have provided some quite modest support for individual schools to look, in their particular circumstances, at what they could do to encourage more children to walk, to use a bike, or otherwise not to be increasing the school run. You have seen there a lot of creativity in terms of how working with their local authority, both from the education side and its wider transport responsibilities with transport providers in the private sector, with parents with voluntary groups, schools have been able to make quite significant shifts. Our action plan gives some quite striking examples of what schools have done there. The added bonus of course is that good schools have been able to use that as an educational opportunity; so they have talked with their youngsters and their parents about what sustainability means, about the importance of exercise and so on. There is a strong win/win school travel planning; and hence the action plan talks about extending that and giving every school the opportunity and incentive to develop those.
Q2 Chairman: When did school travel plans come in? What is the history of that initiative?
Ms Jones: The Department of Transport started looking at travel planning not just for schools but for workplaces as well, three or four years ago. We have got to the situation now where at the end of March 2003 we had 2,500 schools with travel plans, and there will be another 1,000 or 1,500 in the year to 31 March 2004; so it is something that has been around for a few years.
Q3 Chairman: The lead player being the single institution, the school.
Ms Jones: Yes.
Q4 Chairman: What have been the successes of that? What is good practice?
Ms Jones: We can certainly cite a number of schools where we have seen a quite dramatic shift in the mode of travel to school. To give an example, Holmer Green School in Buckinghamshire started off with 62 per cent of pupils travelling to school by car, and it is now down to 26 per cent, but we have seen more modest shifts in secondary schools. I have one example where there has been a 21 per cent reduction in car travel; but you have also got other secondary schools where, working together with local transport authorities, schools have put in place sensible cycle routes and have boosted cycling by 5-10 per cent, perhaps making it 30-40 per cent. We have to look at what is appropriate for the circumstances of the school.
Q5 Chairman: It is building on that original initiative. Peter, I have broken into your train of thought.
Mr Housden: I think that all of that has been done within existing legislation. In parallel with that has been running a dialogue with schools, local authorities, the Local Government Association and others, about whether increased legislative flexibility would help us take this a significant step forward. This is what this draft bill is about. It reflects a fair degree of consensus amongst the key players that it is important to try and establish some pattern of flexibility. There are two or three important things about it. First, it is based on the idea of pilot schemes approved by the Secretary of State, which have to demonstrate their effectiveness in terms of reducing car use, and also their acceptability to the local community of parents and other stakeholders; so they are very much based on the principle of their voluntary schemes. No local authority will ever be required to adopt one; it is voluntary, based on extensive consultation and on the particular local circumstances. They reflect a desire to see whether you can move past the rigidities of the current statutory walking distances, because any cut-off framed in law and regulation like that leaves problems exactly at the boundaries of equity; so if you are not quite on the statutory distance, then you get nothing. This is an opportunity for authorities, building on the practices and partnerships that have underpinned the success of school travel plans, to put forward a scheme, to win local support for it, and to see what they can do to drive forward on those objectives within their area.
Q6 Chairman: Most of us I imagine would agree that it is quite an interesting way of looking at changing something as complex as school transport, so pilots should be encouraged. Are we sure that the assessment will be built in to these pilots and that the assessment procedure will be sufficiently rigorous to know whether we have achieved anything by them? What is going to be the mark of success of a really successful project?
Mr Housden: We have got quite an interesting layer of measures to be sure about how individual schemes are being effective. We are keen always to balance here good quality information to judge effectiveness against unnecessary burdens on schools or other parties concerned. At each school level we envisage that the school travel plan will have specific measurable objectives built within it, and a mechanism to collect those. In many cases, we have seen that done simply by hands-up surveys in classrooms about how people are travelling and making an educational process of that measurement over time. We have also, through the pattern of school travel advisers, who we are funding with the Department for Transport in local authorities, the capacity to draw their intelligence alongside that about the effectiveness of individual schemes. The Department for Transport's travel survey, which is done every year, will over time give an indication of trends. The final point on this, which is interesting, is that Somerset are making use of the pupil level annual census data that we have electronically established, so that each pupil with a specific identifiable number with their address within the schools information system are able to track precisely which pupils live which distances from the school that have actually changed their patterns of transport. That is a pilot scheme that Somerset is interested in, but it will give us a further level of intelligence about the effectiveness.
Q7 Chairman: Normally, pilots go with some sweeteners of inducements to take them up. The rumour out of the Department was that it was envisaged that as these pilots were awarded, there would be some extra resource to go with them. We are all aware of the increased sophistication of transport logistic systems, using IT, global positioning satellites and new vehicles. That is expensive. If you are going to go down that route, it seems a little unkind not to operate inducements in terms of at least capital investment.
Mr Housden: You would not want me to comment on rumours, but let me say two things.
Q8 Chairman: You can tell us the truth, if you like, or scotch the rumours!
Mr Housden: I would always endeavour to do that. The capital incentives are available for all schools, primary and secondary. You have an approved school travel plan, so £5,000 for a primary school, £10,000 for a secondary school. The action plan has now been published for five or six months, and interestingly that is a significant inducement. People are very interested to get hold of that level of capital and to get an approved plan. The burden of your question is on the wider pilots. We go back here to the £2 billion of public money that is subsidising transport in local areas. Something like half a billion of that is schools related. We know from our knowledge of local areas that there is considerable scope for greater integration - and you mentioned some of the technological opportunities that are available now. If you take social services transport, health transport, indeed the general way in which the general public's transport, quite unconnected with schools, is being subsidised; the way that vehicles are being used and deployed; the nature of contracts that are being struck between public authorities and bus contractors, all of that in many authorities is quite piecemeal. The evidence of successful schemes suggests there is quite a bit of mileage to get greater efficiency out of the £2 billion. Our ministers, either in the Department for Education and Skills or the Department for Transport that direct financial incentives were necessary for large public authorities.
Q9 Chairman: Putting that to one side, when you talk about an overall cost of £2 billion, that is fine; but do these pilots allow scope for any of these projects to look at transport for children right across the piece, or indeed transport for health or education? Some of us would have thought that given the different demands of transporting children to clinics, and patients to hospitals and other health facilities, an integrated system that did not have a boundary between education and health or anything else, might be something that pilots ought to look at. Are they going to be able to look more broadly?
Mr Housden: Absolutely. You have caught the essence of the scheme there really, because each local circumstance will be different. The pattern of health-related transport in a rural area, for example, would be markedly different than one in an urban area. The scheme does give the opportunity for all local partners to think about that. You are right also to say that the local transport authority will have an interest in the whole of its population in school and out, so children's transport can very much come to the fore. There are no specific requirements or developments in there that say in relation to health or any other part of the community or its interests "thou shalt be involved" but the scope is clearly there. An interesting dimension to this also is about transport for older people. You have seen some progressive transport authorities do some exciting things about increasing the capacity for mobility for older people who do not own cars. All of that can be brought into the development of these local schemes.
Q10 Chairman: My colleagues will want to go into some depth on that, but there is one last question from me on that. What about an overall sustainability evaluation of these new proposals? It is all very well introducing a whole new package of systems through pilots, but could it be that the different ways we are approaching this kind of school transport and broader public transport issue could add up to greater pollution of the environment, more mileage, more global warming? Is going to be built into this a very clear mandate to have the sustainability of these projects carefully evaluate?
Mr Housden: Yes, in both senses of the word. It is emphatically aimed at reducing car use and congestion. The separation of those two is interesting, but they are both factors that directly cause pollution. That is what it is about, and providing a better service for people in that context. The voluntary local consensus-built approach to the pilots is the key to the other sense of sustainability, that these are not things that are forced on communities, which gives the opportunity for people to bring as much as they can into a local solution that meets their needs.
Q11 You gave a very reasonable introduction, well-reasoned introduction, as to why it came about initially. When you start to think about it, if it is congestion, then it is other people's use of the road and pollution, and in fact it is not child-centred. You went on to talk about individual schools coming up with their plan, but I still do not get a sense from reading the Draft Bill as to where the priorities of the Department for Education and Skills really lies. If a group of governors and LEA are sitting around a table, what are you asking them to look at first? What is the real priority for their pilot scheme? How would you judge it in priority terms?
Mr Housden: All schools have the responsibility to be good citizens. In helping their community, their parents and their children, to think about sustainable means of transport, that is a prime example of how they can fulfil their responsibility, because they and the whole community will suffer from pollution and congestion. There are also some pretty well-evidenced health benefits from cycling and walking and other non sedentary ways of getting to school. Both of those things will be important for youngsters. The local school's circumstances, almost by definition, will be particular and they will need to reach a view about what changes and what facilities and what incentives will matter for them. But in terms of how you pitch this to a governing body or an individual school, it is about wider community benefit, which will have direct benefits for the pupils and all the people involved in the school as citizens and individually, who can actually form part of a very important education experience. This is not just plucked out of the air, but school travel advisers and planning experience so far tells us that, properly handled, this can be a rich experience educationally.
Q12 Valerie Davey: One obvious way of stopping the congestion would be to change the time of going to school. If that is the top priority and local people are going to work at eight or nine, then the schools should not open until half past nine; but that does not address the other issues that you then come on to, although it might make it safer for children to walk to school if there were not so many cars on the road. Therefore the scheme that any individual school comes up with is interesting, but if you talk about the community, there does not seem to be a sufficiently integrated approach, so you are not encouraging LEAs to do things together and you are not encouraging schools to be seen to be doing it together. How wide is the community in the pilots that you want to encourage?
Mr Housden: There are two very important points there. On the "togetherness" point, very many schools will have to do this together, will they not? Primary and secondary schools on the same site - and there are plenty of those - will certainly be encouraged by local authorities to do that. You are also right to say that the local authority boundaries are quite arbitrary in relation to this, and it will often be necessary for two, three or four authorities to plan together. Although the law requires that each individual local authority will need to be making an application for a pilot scheme, the capacity for those to be jointly conceived is very much within our thinking. Can I return to your point about staggered opening hours, because it is critical really. We are not proposing to take away from individual schools the decision that their governors can make about their opening hours because we think that that is absolutely fundamental to the ethos, spirit and capacity of the school to shape its experience for youngsters. What that does not mean, however, is that we are not encouraging conversations about whether co-ordination of that can help better use of transport, because there is a deficiency question here, and also possibly reduced congestion. It illustrates though the balance that you have to strike in all of this, because what you are seeing countervailing this at the moment is quite a number of schools in the secondary sphere wanting to co-ordinate their opening and closing times so that they can together offer, particularly students of 14-plus a richer range of options on the vocational side. This is a good example of the balance you have to strike in all of this, but we are not proposing to take away from an individual school that capacity to shape its own opening and closing times, but would like them to think about in a wider context.
Q13 Valerie Davey: You mentioned £5,000 in primary and £10,000 for secondary as an inducement. Did you say that was capital?
Mr Housden: Yes, it is capital.
Q14 Valerie Davey: The school I got, which desperately - "we could get more children going to one particular school if we could offer more for a crossing lady or a crossing patrol person". If they have not got it within their school funding, the LEA does not think it is a priority, but more youngsters would definitely walk to school if that crossing were safer. I am sorry that it is solely capital.
Mr Housden: Yes. In terms of revenue investment, that would be a matter to be locally funded and developed; but the capital funding is that from the Department, yes.
Q15 Paul Holmes: Given that LEAs have so much flexibility and freedom of operation anyway, why do we need a transport bill to allow pilots when LEAs could do most of this anyway? What is the key difference?
Mr Housden: You are right to say that local authorities have got, within the existing legislation, more scope than many of them are currently exploiting; and there is quite a wide variety of practice. I think the stumbling block for those at the sharper end of practice, who have been wanting to push the boundaries out progressively, has been the statutory walking distances; that they are constrained by all of that. There is some evidence to back up the view that a sensible, sustainable regime of charging would enable them, with appropriate safeguards, to increase the overall level of public satisfaction; so more parents would be happy about how their youngsters were travelling safely to school, and would be able to take further steps to reduce car use on the school run. Essentially, it is about providing a framework from which you could safely remove the existing quite rigid requirements.
Q16 Paul Holmes: If the Secretary of State just altered that basic regulation about the distance to school, could he not then leave it to all the LEAs to experiment as they liked, rather than having a bill with a lot of fanfare and up to 20 pilots. The cynics would say that this is just a way of appearing to do something and putting everything off until 2011.
Mr Housden: I think it is a reflection of what we see as the complexity of this, and wanting to proceed carefully. We have the sense that if this was an easy problem to resolve, it would have been sorted quite a while ago. There certainly will be sensitivities. People who receive free transport will want to scrutinise very carefully any proposal in their area, will they not? To get the maximum benefit from this, the range of potential players and organisations that have to be involved is pretty wide. The pilot mechanism, which is fairly widely drawn and quite large - we are thinking about as many as 20 over this period - and giving them a fairly extended time period to prove their success or otherwise, and then allowing those regulations to lapse and then it becoming a general capacity for any authority that wants to do it, but without requiring all authorities. It is an interesting way of framing a law, is it not? A council that reaches the view that the existing statutory walking distance is no barrier, and that they can make progress satisfactorily now under existing law, will be able so to do. It will be interesting to see how that moves. We are trying to strike that balance.
Q17 Paul Holmes: A lot of the lobbying from LEAs is that they want a change in the rules. How far has that been thrown into focus as an unforeseen consequence of LMS for schools? Schools welcomed LMS; government them puts pressure on LEAs to spend less and less centrally; so the transport budget now makes up a bigger and bigger percentage of a smaller and smaller chunk that the LEAs control. How far is it an unforeseen consequence of that process?
Mr Housden: You are absolutely right to say that there are pressures upon local authority budgets that have run since 1998/99, but progressively the Government remains very committed to maximising the amount of money that is in school budgets, and this is part of all of that. Local authorities in addition, as you suggest, have faced increased pressures on this budget, particularly in relation to special educational needs, which we might come on to later. There is a big impetus, is there not, for local authorities to look hard at the value for money they are getting? In many cases, that is what has driven the integration that the Chairman referred to earlier, but we think that is good, and a sensible use of public money.
Q18 Chairman: Are you saying that if many other authorities are stimulated into having a project, then the Department would smile on that? They would not be part of the pilot because you are restricting those to 20 or 26, as a I read the Bill, but quite honestly, if my own authority of Kirklees did not get chosen they could get on with it anyway, because they would be able to under the current legislation.
Mr Housden: They would be bound by the statutory distances if they were not part of the formal pilot arrangements, but all other of it they could do. The action plan and the Bill need to be seen together, and we hope that the combination of those two will create that sort of bow wave you describe.
Q19 Mr Gibb: My understanding of the Draft Bill, clause 1, paragraphs 2 and 3, is that a local authority is required to provide transport if the distance exceeds the walking distance, but you may provide schemes if the distance is under that. I do not understand why you do not just change the walking distance. What is the Government's view about what is reasonable for a child to walk to school, assuming, all things being equal, that it is safe for a child to walk to school? Why is it that three miles for a child over eight and two miles for a child under eight is considered as reasonable when it is what should be regarded as reasonable?
Mr Housden: It is a judgment of Solomon as to what ought to be regarded as reasonable. Our sense has been that what has been regarded as reasonable has got a shorter and shorter distance over the years. If you pitched your mind back 40 or 50 years, I understand the nation as a whole were much more willing, and in some senses had no choice but to walk long distances. Those statutory requirements reflect that sort of period. All the evidence that comes to us is that parents are concerned about traffic danger and stranger danger - all those sorts of issues which have made them more nervous about youngsters walking or cycling to school; hence the importance of travel plans which can remove some of the burdens and barriers to that. We have also seen changing patterns of employment and more women in the labour market particularly, which have meant that people are more willing and needing to take their youngsters to school in a car. Therefore, rather than set a new framework, a new judgment about what is reasonable, we are encouraging local communities to think about a solution that does not require that type of rigidity. If, for example, you were to agree in the House that a different set of numbers was appropriate with statutory walking distances, you would just be setting another rigid barrier, which the people just the other side of in distance terms would be disappointed. If you are just short of three miles, or you have an unsafe walking route, you have got cause for a grievance - and I am sure you will have constituency cases of that type that come up. It is a matter of finding a more flexible approach to that, which is locally built, and that is what we are interested in doing.
Q20 Mr Gibb: What is the Government's view non-statutorily about what is reasonable for a child under eight or over eight to walk?
Mr Housden: I am not aware that the Government has taken a view about that.
Ms Jones: I know that colleagues in the Department for Transport are working on a strategy at the moment, but there are no numbers quoted as to what might be reasonable for anybody of a particular age to walk. It depends on the individual and it particularly depends on the safety of the route and any obstacles or barriers - are there any railways to cross and so on.
Mr Gibb: Assume those things are not in the way, in terms of what one can expect a child to walk, assuming there is no danger and a straightforward route; does the Government, with all its experts and apparent obesity strategy, have a view? Is it 10 yards 100 yards, half a mile, a mile? It is astonishing that, with all your access to resources of expertise, you do not have a view that can assist in an advisory way to local authorities in regard to their plans.
Q21 Chairman: You look puzzled.
Mr Housden: It is so conditioned by the age and the nature of the young person concerned, and the circumstances of the journey, that it illustrates the Government's desire to move away from the rigidities that would be implied by replacing the statutory limits with another set.
Q22 Mr Gibb: I am not saying a strategy; I just wanted to get a view of what the experts think is reasonable for a child to walk. I have no idea.
Mr Housden: No.
Q23 Chairman: Have you commissioned any research from the psychologists or whoever, from people who have an interesting mix of intellectual academic qualifications to work that out? Has any research been commissioned by the Department?
Mr Housden: Penny or Peter might speak about research, but in terms of what we know about parents and the judgments they make about what is reasonable, those have certainly been shrinking. Typically, with a journey of more than a mile to a primary school these days, overwhelmingly parents are looking to cars or other means to do that.
Ms Jones: I am not aware of any research as to what pupils can walk. We only know what is there on the ground. We do know the distances that children travel to school from the National Travel Survey.
Q24 Mr Gibb: You have not commissioned anything by the Department of Health as to what would be acceptable or a recommended distance for a child to walk -----
Ms Jones: No, and it depends how far away from school they live as well.
Q25 Mr Gibb: I am surprised, given all this fuss about obesity and the desire to get children to walk or cycle, that you have commissioned no research to try and make policy, professionally created, instead of just assertion, that you have not commissioned research about what is regarded as reasonable for a child to walk.
Mr Housden: As you say, the case is very well made in general about the importance of exercise, including walking, in combating obesity and promoting good health. We have not commissioned research into the specifics of how a walking journey to school contributes to that, so there we have it. But we believe the general proposition that measures that encourage young people to walk safely to school will contribute towards their healthy way of living.
Q26 Mr Gibb: You have no evidence on which to base that assertion.
Mr Housden: Other than the general evidence that is available that connects exercise with well-being.
Q27 Chairman: One of the fundamental differences is that between 1944 now, is the number of metal flying around roads so that cycling and walking are very different propositions now than they were in 1944.
Mr Housden: Yes.
Q28 Helen Jones: I want to follow up my colleague's question in a very complex area, as you have said. In the original action plan there was reference to other Government initiatives such as tackling childhood obesity and reducing congestion. I would like to explore a little what the exact purpose of this is because we talked earlier about staggering school opening hours, but how do we do that without also linking in to other areas of Government policy such as that which encourages single parents to go out to work? If school opening hours are staggered, that leads to childcare problems if you have more than one child. Has any consideration been given to that? It reduces congestion, but gives a knock-on problem elsewhere.
Mr Housden: Absolutely, and that is an example of the way in which you have to strike balances on this. You can make a case for saying that staggered opening hours will contribute to certain outcomes, but then you can equally well say they may life more difficult for people with childcare responsibilities. My earlier example was saying they also can be an obstacle to schools collaborating effectively to broaden the offer for pupils. Again, I do not think there was one right royal road on that; it will be about that balance being struck locally, according to particular circumstances.
Q29 Helen Jones: Will your guidance to school governors, for example, include a proper dialogue with parents and perhaps with neighbouring schools, bearing in mind that a lot of parents have children at more than one school?
Mr Housden: Absolutely.
Q30 Helen Jones: The tackling of obesity was referred to in the original action plan, but I think we have lost sight of that. The Bill gives capital grants to schools and allows local authorities to charge for school transport. Do you agree that in many cases, if we want children to walk to school, there is a lot of capital that needs to be spent on things like making pavements safer and wider; and in an area such as the one I represent actually putting pavements in at all? An individual school cannot do that; it is a local authority matter. How are we going to encourage local authorities to take that seriously when there does not appear to be any pump-priming money available for them to carry out that sort of work?
Mr Housden: Local authorities with highways and transport authorities get very substantial funding from the Government, which they supplement from Council Tax income. They are able to, importantly, shape their own priorities around that. The council that I used to work for had a budget for precisely that type of activity, which it used. It was not as large as the council would have liked but it used it for particular concerns of road safety. You see in examples of councils working well on all of this that they connect the school travel planning outcomes with the budget-making decisions over a period to tackle particular issues. We have seen examples where the school has made provision for cycling sheds and changing facilities, and the local authority has made provision for lit walkways and other means to make cycling to school safe. This is not the land of milk and honey where all problems will be solved because cash will be flowing in all directions, but, nevertheless, the capacity within existing resources to bring together local authorities' funding and that of the schools exists.
Q31 Helen Jones: I accept what you say, but would you also accept that some local authorities have far greater problems in these areas than others? There will be authorities that cover large rural areas, for instance, and authorities like mine with large town areas that were built without pavements along the main road. Have you looked at the particular problems that some areas face, which cannot be tackled within the current budget except over a very long period of time? If we want schools to put into place walking, buses, encouragement to children to cycle to school, surely that has to be joined up with a look at how we are directing money to local authorities for other areas of transport planning?
Mr Housden: Peter may want to comment on this from the Department for Transport's point of view, but the key thing for us in all of that is alignment of the overall objectives of Government policy; hence the importance here that we put on reducing congestion as being the clear main objective here, of reducing reliance on the school run. If that consistency of policy is apparent in our work on school transport planning and underpins the Department for Transport's overall impetus, it increases the likelihood of funding being used for the type of integration you describe.
Mr Openshaw: Providing better footways, pavements and so forth is obviously all part of the responsibility of highway authorities, and it does come from the general allocation of funding. I am not sure that I have anything specific to add.
Q32 Chairman: In these schemes, as Helen Jones said, is there a capacity in the pilot areas for there to be an overall assessment of appropriate footpaths, cycle routes, all of which I presume would be part of constituting a good bid for being one of the pilot areas?
Mr Openshaw: I am sure that would be part of the overall bids.
Q33 Chairman: It could go right across the piece, but there is no extra money for it.
Mr Openshaw: If the local authority wanted to put in a capital bid for funding through the local transport plan system that was related to a pilot scheme, this would obviously be something that my department would be looking at.
Q34 Helen Jones: But is there a system between the departments to co-ordinate looking at the two bids in that case?
Mr Openshaw: I think we will be co-operating very closely in the assessment of these pilot bids.
Q35 Chairman: When is the due date for them to be in, and when will they be approved? When does this process start?
Ms Jones: It all depends on when the legislation clears the House, and we cannot predict that at the moment.
Q36 Chairman: What are you aiming for? It is not exactly the Higher Education Bill, is it? You have fair confidence that this will go through reasonably smoothly.
Ms Jones: Just to show we are joined up, we hope very much that we will have the bids with us by summer 2005; and of course the Local Transport Plan bids go in in July. We have a link there. We hope to approve the bids in the autumn of 2005, because parents applying for a school place for September 2006, when their child changes school or is admitted to school, will want to know by October 2005 when they make that application what the transport arrangements are going to be. That is why we have the timetable around the summer of 2005, but there is also the link to the Local Transport Plan.
Mr Housden: Could I clarify Helen Jones's important point here, because although Penny has been describing the arrangements that will apply to the pilots, it is open - and we would encourage every council that is developing a school travel plan - which is all 150 local authorities - to make the type of integration you describe; so there is no dependency on being in a pilot or not. Everybody could do that. We hope that the impetus of involving parents and local communities in thinking hard about what is right for their school or group of schools will have its effect on the local authority and lift the priority of this in terms of local spending decisions.
Q37 Helen Jones: Do you accept that could also raise expectations which local authorities will not be able to fulfil without the money being available to them? If you have every group of schools in a local authority discussing a transport plan, asking for better cycle routes, better payments and financial support amongst other things, and there is not enough capital funding to meet those expectations, you are in danger of raising hopes that cannot then be fulfilled.
Mr Housden: Inevitably. Rising expectations typically are good in public policy terms because they do encourage those responsible for decision-making to think very, very hard about how they can meet those aspirations. Our experience is that many of the requirements of school travel plans do not necessarily require a lot of expenditure or indeed any, and are just about better planning and co-ordination. So one hopes that people would be able to make progress on those fronts as they can, and hope that the pressure and impetus and momentum behind all of this will encourage local decision-makers to prioritise these sorts of issues, and with a proper alignment of transport objectives and education objectives, that stands a good chance.
Q38 Mr Gibb: Is there a possibility that people will use the discretionary power in the Bill and take action where the local authority has not used that discretionary power to provide transport arrangements? What is the legal advice?
Mr Housden: In terms of individual citizens?
Q39 Mr Gibb: Yes, people who say, "okay, my child is within three miles, but you have a discretion to provide transport and you have not, and therefore under this Act I will take action against you". Will the discretion not lead to more litigation rather than less?
Mr Housden: Clearly, we hope not. Typically, the existing legislation has not led to a lot of litigation per se, but we are aware of quite a lot of dissatisfaction that people at the boundaries have had. Your point is important. In the guidance we do say that it will be very important for councils putting forward to be part of the pilots that they have considered all of those types of issue, particularly those around human rights, to make sure they have a fair and equitable scheme in legal terms. Our general legal advice is that the framework we are putting forward is not likely to fall foul of those requirements; but we have - to underpin your concern - specifically said to local authorities that as they develop the specific scheme, they must make sure that it is fully compliant in that sense.
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 per cent 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 6 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 6. We said between 6 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 per cent 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.
Q60 Mr Chaytor: There is a chart (Annex K) showing the increase from 2000/1 to 2001/2, 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.
Mr Openshaw: If it would be helpful, I think my department calculated that the annualised increase for local transport contracts was around 7.5 per cent. 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 per cent. 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 ends 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 have 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" is being piloted alongside a different relationship between the local authority school improvement function of 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 ten 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.
Q80 Paul Holmes: Earlier on we were talking about some of the possible contradictions or overlaps between, say, this policy from the DfES and Transport policy and Health policy on obesity and so on. Could I explore some of the contradictions within the DfES with different policies and this draft bill. First of all, alongside CTCs you have the government policy of massively expanding specialist schools, and then city academies which are coming on stream. One of the logics of that whole experiment is that you will have children criss-crossing all over an area, not going to their local school but all over the area to the modern languages specialist school, to the engineering school, to the city academy, to the CTC and so forth. Here you have a draft bill which is trying to cut down on transport and travel but a mainstream DfES policy which seems to be encouraging movement and travel. Do you have any comments on that?
Mr Housden: Yes. Clearly those balances have to be struck. The first important point you make is that we are talking here about a legal pattern which enables parents to express a preference for a school and for that preference to be met unless there are compelling reasons to the contrary that are spelt out. There certainly is some evidence that parents over time have been more willing, able and keen to exercise those preferences where they exist. We can speculate about the reasons for this. It may be broadly social movements, about people wanting to exercise more choice. It may also be about changed patterns in the labour market and childcare responsibilities: entering the labour market and working at place X, it may actually be more convenient for your youngsters to go to a school close to place X. We know of all those factors that apply. The second question is whether the specialist school policy and the diversity policy in general has accentuated or accelerated the tendency for parents to exercise that choice. On CTCs and academies, there are very small numbers of those schools in relation to the overall secondary complement, but your point about specialist schools is important because the Government's intention -----
Q81 Chairman: Could you repeat the distinction between the two? There is a small number of ----?
Mr Housden: City technology colleges.
Q82 Chairman: You did not include specialist schools.
Mr Housden: I beg your pardon, I will come on to that. There is a small number of city technology colleges and government is using essentially the same legislation to create academies, but across both those categories these are very small numbers of schools. It is possible, even in relation to that small number of schools, to exaggerate the extent to which they are actually drawn from a wide area. They are broadly neighbourhood schools. The point on specialist schools is of greater importance numerically because it this Government's intention is, as you know, that over time all schools should have the opportunity to become specialist, and already now we have the majority of secondary pupils in specialist schools. Again, there is no evidence that that is actually having the effect on admissions that you describe.
Q83 Paul Holmes: In the draft bill prospectus that you have issued for authorities to have input, you say on page 38 that increasing numbers of families exercise parental preference.
Mr Housden: Yes, they do.
Q84 Paul Holmes: You have also mentioned "the nearest suitable school". The social exclusion unit identified this issue as one that the DfES should tackle because wealthy parents are exercising that preference and poorer families are being excluded from exercising their preference. You say, "We hope that one or more exemplar LEAs will see what can be done for low income families who choose to exercise parental preference." You are saying that this is happening on a bigger and bigger scale but that poorer families are being excluded, and you want some of these pilot schemes to help increase that number. So you have a draft Transport Bill which is trying to plan car use and travel etcetera, but you are saying that we also want to increase it for poorer parents so they can take advantage of the parental preference opportunities that come via specialist schools, CTCs and academies.
Mr Housden: Yes. I think that is right, in the sense that you have a range of opportunities that the Government would like to make available to as wide a group of parents as possible, but in doing so - and here is the importance of the transport policy - to minimise the impact on the environment, congestion, car use through the types of measures we have been describing this morning. The point I was going to make about specialist schools is that, in the use of their capacity to select pupils, only 6 or 7 per cent of them are actually adopting that within their arrangements, so 93/94 per cent of specialist schools are not exercising that opportunity. What is tending to happen in the range of patterns of choice, as far as we know, is that you will have, yes, at the margins small numbers of youngsters saying, "Yes, I am so committed to excellence in that area that I would like, if possible, to attend that school," but generally that specialism, as part of an offer in a local area, is becoming significant for youngsters particularly at 14 plus - so that it might be out of school or on an option day that a youngster might go to that specialist school, just as they might in the past have gone to a further education college. You are right to say this does have the effect of increasing the amount of mobility in the system, and I think that is one of the trade-offs that government has to strike, is it not, between choice and opportunity on the one hand and mobility on the other? You cannot have one without the other. I think we are trying here to get the cake and the halfpenny, to enable as broad a range of people to take advantage of those opportunities but at the same time to minimise the impact on congestion.
Q85 Paul Holmes: You want to increase mobility but minimise the impact of increasing mobility. They seem a bit contradictory. To move on to another area, which is the massive expansion we are told in faith schools, I am wondering, again looking at some of the draft regulations and guidelines, about the potential for more and more legal conflict here. There is a case going on in Brighton at the moment where the parents, who are Church of England, are sending their child to a Catholic school because it is a faith school and they have been told by the LEA, "We will not pay for that. We will pay if you are a Catholic but we will not pay if you are Church of England, even though you are going to the faith school." The other side of the issue is when children or their parents do not want to go to a denominational school. A case in Lancashire has been running through the courts, where a girl who was an atheist did not want to attend her two nearest schools - one was Catholic, one was CofE - she wanted to go to a third school, but the LEA would not pay. On 10 March Lancashire County Council wrote to them saying, "Our lawyers have looked at the Human rights Act. They advise that there could well be a breach here because we are paying for faith schools but not for children to go to non faith schools. We will pay up." That decision was only two and a half weeks ago. You do touch on this in all the guidelines here for authorities. You say that they need to take into account preferences for particular schools as a result of religious or philosophical beliefs and language in Wales. Is there not a big can of worms that is opened up here? Again, there will be more and more parental preference being expressed, especially if this Lancashire decision about the Human Rights Act is interpreted more widely. If you are going to have a massive expansion of faith schools, that is going to mean more travel or cost. Secondly, the Lancashire decision seems to imply that a whole lot of other people should be getting transport costs as well. If you are paying for a child to go to a faith school, you should be paying for a lot of children to go to non faith schools as well.
Ms Jones: I think this is a particularly difficult area because we do not have any case law. It is only something that has really cropped up over the last year or two. When the Human Rights Act talks about religious and philosophical beliefs, we think there has to be something other than somebody saying, "I'm not religious." Normally, in order to gain admission to a denominational school someone would have to show proof of attending church and that sort of thing. Our preliminary view is that if someone says they are an atheist you would expect to see that they are a humanist or some evidence that they adhere to a particular philosophical body, something that was generally accepted as being a philosophical belief, rather than just a general belief that they were not of any particular religious persuasion. But it is very difficult because we have not had a test case. When we have, we will know exactly where the legal boundaries are.
Q86 Paul Holmes: So you are going to look at the Lancashire judgment with great interest. I saw you nodding your head when I mentioned it.
Ms Jones: It will be very interesting. I thought you said the LEA had decided to -----
Q87 Paul Holmes: Prior to going through the court they had taken legal judgment which said, "We'd better give in on this one before it goes to court."
Ms Jones: Yes, and until we have a court case we will not know the boundaries are.
Q88 Paul Holmes: In view of what you have said, which is a bit more open and receptive than previous comments I have had from the DfES, I am interested in the precise language you have used in the prospectus here and the draft bill. In paragraph 22 you start off using the language of the Human Rights Act under article 2, where you talk about religious or philosophical beliefs, but when you come to the final sentence you say, "LEAs should ensure that transport arrangements support the denominational ..." and you miss out the "philosophical" bit there. You start off talking about religion or philosophical beliefs but end up only talking about providing transport for religious denominational beliefs. Is that a mistake from the beginning to the end of the paragraph?
Ms Jones: Yes, it is an inconsistency but I am trying to give a sting here for the practicalities of the situation. We have a situation where we have a fairly large number of denominational schools in the country. Many of the pupils who attend those denominational schools will not be attending their nearest suitable school. Obviously if it is their nearest school there is no difficulty because transport is provided, but the purpose of that paragraph is to signal to local education authorities that if you have a low income family which has strong religious convictions, which cannot pay bus fares to get their child to school and it is not the nearest suitable school so the LEA will not pay up, there could be human rights issues there.
Q89 Paul Holmes: In the first sentence you mention "faith or philosophy" and then you say "religious or philosophical belief" - and, as I say, that is very much the language of article 2 of the Human Rights Act - but two sentences later you forget the philosophy. Is that an oversight or is that a deliberate government policy to fudge the issue?
Ms Jones: No. It is only a draft. I think you have drawn attention to something that we will need to change when we finalise the draft.
Q90 Paul Holmes: On the same theme about contradictions in educational policy, you have specialists, academies, CTCs saying we want more movement but this policy saying less; you have faith schools saying we want more movement but this policy saying less; you are also saying that LEAs should try to look at how they can minimise travel or cooperate on travel arrangements. How far is that going to be possible when you have individual head teachers in schools working perhaps to different agendas from what might be good for transport policy in the area? If schools increasingly through league tables are seen as being in competition with each other and through the specialist schools they are all seen as different and drawing in different people, how are they going to work together on common transport policies when it might not be in their interests? Some schools, certainly some colleges, do offer free transport in order to bring in good pupils from as far afield as possible. They are not going to want to cooperate on a transport policy that minimises that movement, are they?
Mr Housden: The last several years have seen quite a substantial increase in the capacity/willingness of head teachers of locally managed schools to collaborate across a wide range of issues. The Government's Excellence in Cities policy, for example, would be one, the Leadership Incentive would be another, where there has been a platform for schools to engage with each other. Often that has been around the provision of curriculum opportunities for youngsters or training opportunities for their staff to collaborate in that way. You will see also government doing things like creating schools forums and a number of other bodies to give head teachers a greater stake in decision making about local education policy. Underpinning all that, you will typically see in local authorities now quite a dense network of discussion between primary and secondary head teachers and the local authorities. In both senses, both laterally and vertically, I think there is a higher level of good quality conversation going on now and we certainly will want to encourage schools to look at transport planning within that construct. I think you are right to say there are limiting cases to all and this will not be about compulsion. We would be hoping that the general momentum that would be established at local level would create a climate of the school as a good citizen, where people would want to play the best part they reasonably could. I have one final point. Some schools - and the denominational schools would be a good example - where a significant number of youngsters are actually travelling to the school from some distance every day, have a very real stake in keeping that arrangement right and proper and as an integral part of the school, but we want to bring them to the table, to that sort of discussion.
Q91 Paul Holmes: In terms of Tomlinson's draft ideas on 14-19, the suggestion that a pupil might spend two days in school, one day at college, one day with an employer and so forth, again is going to mean a lot more movement in transport and travel. Obviously this cannot take that into account, because it has not come into effect yet, but in the time scale between now and 2011, how is that going to impact on all this?
Mr Housden: It does not of itself mean that there will be additional congestion demands because you will have youngsters from the same family, one of whom might now be going, for example, to secondary school and one to a college, and on a particular day they will just be going to the same place. It does not automatically mean there will be an increase but you are right to say that is the general impetus of policy. It is an example also of the type of balances you were describing earlier on because one of the big concerns of Tomlinson and the government as a whole has been the poor quality of the vocational offer that is available to youngsters of 14-plus in its connection to the world of work. The only way we are going to tackle that sensibly is by centres of excellence. It is impossible to imagine 3,200 secondary schools all developing a full range of vocational courses and having the qualified staff to deliver them. It is in the nature of the beast that youngsters will need to go to places where they can get specialist tuition. I think that is one of the contexts in which these local travel plans will be developed: people will want to plan around all of that. We have seen from the types of collaboration I was describing before that the basic ground rules and capacities to do that are already being developed well in most areas.
Q92 Chairman: Is there not a ruthless logic that suggests that to sort this all out, at the same time as you need this bill, the Department really has to look at this whole context of admissions policy but particularly at the historic commitment. We have been looking at one historic commitment in terms of how far it is reasonable to expect a child to walk below and above the age of eight. Perhaps it is a time to look at the historic commitment to free school transport absolutely. Why not abolish it except on the basis of ability to pay? It could be linked to free school meals, and everybody else pays whether they go to religious faith schools or anywhere else. That would evade any human rights problems, would it not? Is the Department thinking radical thoughts like that? I thought this was a radical government.
Mr Housden: That is a clear public expenditure choice for ministers to weigh against others.
Q93 Chairman: Is it discussed? Do people like you not say, "Minister, this is really what you should be doing?"
Mr Housden: We certainly have, in this context and others, laid out the full range of options that are around on all of that. But the public policy process has to strike those balances within the resources that are available to our ministers.
Q94 Chairman: Are those options available to the Committee? The ones you have laid out? You just said you have laid out the full range of options to your minister, can we have a look at them?
Mr Housden: I am sorry, I am not sure of the precedent in those matters, Chairman.
Q95 Chairman: Could you find out from the Department?
Mr Housden: Yes.
Q96 Chairman: And perhaps we can ask the Secretary of State when we see him. Because if the options are there it would be really nice for us to be able to evaluate them as well. Our job is to scrutinise your Department. You do not do these things in secret, do you? You think there is a precedent there, that we would not be able to see these.
Mr Housden: I am not aware, I am sorry.
Q97 Chairman: You look very worried.
Mr Housden: Yes, I am afraid that is the nature of my job! In developing this policy, which I am pleased to have had, apart from the first footings of all this, we have certainly talked about the range of issues you have described here. But I suppose in the back of our minds has been the broad context of public expenditure, the scope that we are likely to have to allocate resources to one priority as opposed to another and the interplay between different policies. So my point really is to say that those sorts of considerations have been at the fore. They are not in the sense of a piece of paper this long that takes every possible option and examines it in a systematic way, but we have clearly thought about it in the round.
Q98 Chairman: You are retreating a bit. You said you had looked at the full range of policy options. That would seem to me, for ministers with scant amount of time, a document that said: "On the one hand ... and on the other ... and here are seven or ten ..." A particular one that would have been appealing is the one I suggested. That would save a lot of money, would it not?
Mr Housden: I am not sure.
Chairman: If you abolished free transport for anyone other than those who have free school meals, that would be a saving, would it not?
Q99 Paul Holmes: And it would meet the Human Rights Act about equal treatment for everybody.
Mr Housden: And the judgment would be about, I suppose, the extent to which that would be a popular policy to adopt.
Chairman: Of course. That is always for politicians an important thing to bear in mind.
Q100 Valerie Davey: If we were to look at this, what legislation would have to be repealed? For example the faith school offer is a free offer for everyone. There is no ability to pay element within that. That would need repeal of legislation, would it?
Ms Jones: I am sorry, could I clarify, you are talking about transport to faith schools, are you?
Q101 Valerie Davey: Yes, we are talking about transport. That is absolutely it. At the present time, within legislation, there is not only the statutory mileage but also the element which says if you need to go to a faith school you get free transport.
Ms Jones: Actually, that is not the situation. Free transport to faith schools is offered by 120 out of 150 local education authorities but there is a small and growing number who make charges for pupils attending faith schools. There is no authority which charges pupils eligible for free school meals. Those which make charges vary from Rutland, which I think I have quoted, at about £94 a year, up to Windsor and Maidenhead, which at last count was £565 a year, and that is quite a lot of money.
Q102 Valerie Davey: Are you able to think of any other element within the existing legislation which would need to be changed on the face perhaps of this bill to bring about the idea - which could be a pilot scheme for an LEA - of the nature which the Chairman has suggested?
Ms Jones: I think the bill is broad enough to cover the sort of proposals which the Chairman was describing.
Q103 Paul Holmes: Is that because some LEAs, as you say, more and more have withdrawn the free transport to faith schools - for budgets reasons really rather than for human rights reasons.
Ms Jones: That is right. We see two or three every year.
Q104 Valerie Davey: If I may come back to one detail. Peter mentioned that it is only a small number of CTCs but my understanding is that here you did have an original pilot which was to give the money to the individual school and allow them to use it for transport. Has any evaluation been done on what happened to the money that went into CTCs for transport?
Mr Housden: Not that I am aware of, no. I would need to take your question away and give you a definitive answer.
Q105 Valerie Davey: I would be grateful if you would. Other staff members have said the same previously, so if we could get an answer to that I would be very grateful.
Mr Housden: That is specifically in relation to CTCs.
Valerie Davey: Yes.
Q106 Chairman: I think we have got a reasonable handle on this bill now. Is there anything you would like to say in conclusion?
Mr Housden: Not from my point of view, no.
Q107 Chairman: Happy?
Ms Jones: Yes, we are happy, thank you.
Chairman: We are reasonably content. Thank you for your attendance.
