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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 687-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
PUBLIC EXPENDITURE ON EDUCATION AND SKILLS
Wednesday 7 July 2004 RT HON CHARLES CLARKE MP Evidence heard in Public Questions 165 - 298
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 7 July 2004 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr David Chaytor Valerie Davey Jeff Ennis Mr Nick Gibb Paul Holmes Mr Kerry Pollard ________________ Witness: Rt Hon Charles Clarke, a Member of the House, Secretary of State for Education and Skills, examined. Q165 Chairman: Secretary of State, as we allow people to settle down, can I welcome you and say that I feel doubly privileged to have been asking questions of the Prime Minister this time yesterday morning and you this morning; but I think you have got a larger attendance than the Prime Minister! Mr Clarke: I do not know why that should be. Probably the chairing of the meeting! Q166 Chairman: I think they were limited to passholders because of the security fears. Can I welcome you. Also, a word to the Press. Where were you last week when we did prison education? Not a single one of you; not one journalist. I have never known that ever. I was very upset that there was a lack of interest out there with prison education. It is a very important piece of our work and that is where many of the failures of our system end up. So I wish, when you go back, you would talk to your editors who can decide who comes to where as prison education goes on. Skills you hardly ever come as to well. We are going to do something about trying to make it more interesting. So, that is me doing my school master's bit! Mr Clarke: Can I issue a series of complaints about the media as well, Chairman? Q167 Chairman: When their mobiles go off I fine them £50, and I have never collected the money! Shall we get down to business. Secretary of State, I normally give you a chance to say a brief word of your own to get us started. Do you wish to do that or do you want to go straight into questions? Mr Clarke: Not really. Just to say I appreciate the invitation and thank you for being here. We are covering a wide range of things but just to reinforce, I very much value the relationship with the Select Committee. You have produced a string of reports this year; you have got some more coming out even before we rise, I think, and we take your reports very seriously even if we do not agree with every particular. Q168 Chairman: With what? Mr Clarke: With every particular. Q169 Chairman: Oh, with every particular. Mr Clarke: We value the relationship and I welcome this as a further stage. Q170 Chairman: Let us get down to business. I promised all sorts of people that I would very quickly mention one thing to you. It is the concern that has been running in the press over the weekend on bogus degrees. A lot of people are very worried, and when you scrape away at this problem it does seems more serious than we at first thought, that people can obtain pretty authentic looking degree diplomas with all the back up paperwork of exams passed, and so on. We do not have a registry of qualifications, and I know that this is a very difficult area. Is the Department aware of this and is it concerned enough to do anything about it? Mr Clarke: We are. I am glad you gave me notice, Chairman, that you would like to raise this question. It might be helpful to the Committee if I set out what the legal position is and how we are dealing with it in response to your question, firstly the general background. It is an offence under section 214 to 216 of the Education Reform Act 1988 for a UK body to award a degree unless it is recognised by the Secretary of State to do so. Where a foreign institution operates in the UK it must make it clear that its degrees are not British. Secondly, the Business Names Act 1985 makes it an offence for any business operating in the UK to use in its business name the word "university" unless approval has been granted formally by the Privy Council. There are two main types of bogus operator that can be reported by the Department to Trading Standards under the Education Reform Act. These are so-called bogus institutions that claim to offer UK degrees or degree courses but are not recognised by the UK authorities to do so. Some of these also claim to be universities and use the word "university" in the UK without the appropriate permission to do so. There are also degree mills, where operators sell what they claim are UK degrees over the Internet, but they are then found to be bogus degrees. The majority of these Internet operators are based overseas, which does make prosecution under UK legislation difficult. We refer cases relating to counterfeit degrees to the Trading Standards Department who liaise with the police. It is a matter for the police to prosecute organisations that offer counterfeit degrees; and section 15 of the Theft Act 1968 makes it an offence to obtain property by deception, and section 16 of the 1968 Act makes it an offence to obtain a pecuniary advantage by deception. We refer all potential breaches of the Education Reform Act 1988 by organisations that are based in the UK and those operating via the Internet to Trading Standards, who have responsibility for enforcement action. We refer all breaches relating to the use of "university" in title to Companies House, who have responsibility for enforcement action under the Business Names Act. It is an offence for any business operator in the UK to use in its business name the word "university", as I have said earlier. It is also an offence to fail to declare ownership details on business stationery. With many unrecognised providers operating over the Internet and registered overseas, students to need to take some responsibility for ensuring they know the status of degrees, and to that end our website (www.dfes.co.uk\recognisedUKdegrees) provides information about recognised degrees and higher education institutions in the UK. It describes the UK higher education system, warns of the problem of unrecognised degrees and directs people to recognise the UK institutions found under the heading "Who can offer you degrees?" on the home page. So that is essentially the position. We get very few examples of complaints from students who have unwittingly enrolled at bogus institutions, and we are working together with the Home Office to produce a list of registered colleges which are 'pucker', if I can put it like that. I am sorry, Chairman, to answer at length, but I thought it might be helpful to place on record in front of your Committee what the legal position is; and we do take it very seriously. Q171 Chairman: That is useful. Some of us met with the British Council yesterday to discuss that and other issues. Would it not be advisable that you and the British Council - you as a department - work with them to almost put a sort of 'kite mark' in to make that more apparent to foreign students intending to come to this country? Mr Clarke: That is precisely the reason why we are currently drawing up the list that we are which we intend to publish by the end of this year. In addition, I should say, quite apart from the activities to which you refer which are reported in the papers, there are some bogus institutions which have been set up to facilitate illegal immigration to this country by a variety of means; and so we have worked very closely with the Home Office and the Home Office has raided a number of these places to identify them for what they are, and we have come to the view, precisely as you suggest, Chairman, that with the British Council and the ‑ I should say not just the British Council but also the association, particularly of language schools, ours as was and is now the new organisation, to work together for a proper 'kite mark' in the way you suggest so that people cannot be fleeced because they do not have the opportunity of knowing what is really taking place. Q172 Valerie Davey: I can I follow that up? I hope that the collaboration extends within the Home Office to the granting of visas so visas are only given for kite marked institutions? Mr Clarke: That is precisely correct. When we get the list finally resolved, which we are working on at the moment and, as I say, will be finally resolved later this year, then the position of the Home Office will be precisely as you suggest, Ms Davey, that visas will only be granted to students going to those recognised institutions; and that is the path that we are now following to try and clear up what has otherwise been significant abuse. Q173 Chairman: Thank you for that, Secretary of State. We have that concern. One of our inquiries is looking at the market for our university institutions overseas. We have recently had a couple of evidence sessions on that from HEFCE and from the British Council. It is such a valuable, can I call it, industry which rests very much on the quality of the provision for higher education. It would be serious if it was undermined. Mr Clarke: I completely agree. Perhaps I could mention to the Committee, Chairman, that we are trying to give a higher profile to the international work that we do in the education field, both through our work with DFID but also with the DTI and the Foreign Office, and we are hoping to publish a policy document later this year to coincide with International Education Week in November setting out ‑ putting the "world" in "world‑class education" - how we can develop this much more positively in a variety of different ways. Q174 Chairman: Are you using higher education income to balance the fact that... If you look at all the education spending in your Department, everything is rising quite robustly right across the piece until we get to HE, which is a little bit of an increase, but not much. When we started the whole debate about higher education and finance we talked about, certainly the Universities UK talked about, an £8 billion gap, and in the discussion over top‑up fees we had a figure between £1.5 billion to £2 billion that would come through that source. Still leaving £6/£6.5 billion, according to Universities UK. Are you putting all your eggs in the overseas student market? Mr Clarke: Not at all. I think if you went and talked to the universities, both the UK and the universities individually, they would acknowledge first that the funding stream has started to go up on a per student basis, albeit slowly, for the first time for decades and is beginning to go up; secondly, the additional income stream that we have suggested through the fee regime, which has now got royal assent, I am going to say; and, thirdly the research increases which we have identified, and I think a paper produced by the Treasury and our Department to be published shortly on science will indicate a continued very strong financial commitment in that area. All are sources of income for universities which, I think, will put them in a better position than they have been for a very long time. I do not accept the description that you give of HE spending being static while the rest of education is moving forward. I do accept the point that you make that we have given a greater priority to primary and secondary education. So it is in a relatively worse position than schools, but I do not think it is as bad as you suggest. Q175 Chairman: But, Secretary of State, I have got the fees in front of me, 1998 through to 2003, 2004 and the change over that period: schools plus 41.9 per cent; under fives plus 17.8 per cent; primary plus 34.2; secondary plus 34.5; other plus 74.2; school capital, nearly a 100 per cent increase; further education and adult (John Brennan will be very pleased with this) 53.2 per cent; higher education 11.3. So it is pretty stark compared to those figures, is it not? Mr Clarke: It is true that at the beginning of the Government, from 1997 onwards, we specifically did give priority to primary and secondary education, and that was an explicit act of policy because we felt as a government that that was where the priority needed to be; but I think in the second Comprehensive Spending Review 2002 settlement we gave a significant extra commitment to higher education which had not been possible earlier on, and, for the reasons that I said, we are committing now in the way that we are, but I make no... It was almost... I know you are a non‑party in the role that you play, Chairman, it was almost a party political, the list of significant increases in expenditure through the course of this Government are in all aspects of education, which indicates how we have been able to invest in the ways that we have; and the fact that is, we do give priority to schools, and I defend that without any qualification, but we are now able to spread that progress throughout the system in the ways that I have described. Q176 Chairman: Thank you for that. Can I ask one further question about that? Everyone is talking about the demographic change of our country; that we are having much less population in the primary and junior schools; the demographic curve is changing; we are going to have an excess of teachers in the primary sector and that is going to move through the system. As that moves through the system are you going to be able to, and will you want to, shift resources from that end of the spectrum through to higher education and further education where the bulge is still moving through? Is that part of the plan? Mr Clarke: It is an entirely correct question, and I will confess to you, Chairman, in the confidence of this room, that the biggest difficulty we have with our CSR settlement, which is generally a good settlement which the Chancellor announced in the budget, is making sure we can properly resource the expansion which will come, for two reasons, in the post‑16 sector, particularly in FE. The first is the demographic pressure that you indicate and, secondly, the fact that we are increasingly successful in our policies and more people are staying on at 16. So you have a double pressure coming in on the resource in those areas, and, as it were, the penalty of success in those areas is that we are under greater financial pressure, and that is what we have been wrestling with. At the bottom end of the demographic pressure we are continuing with the position of saying that we are not prepared to fund schools above their roll now that the falling school roll is a real factor in the situation, and that does give pressures in a number of junior schools and primary schools in the country, particularly in certain areas. In that sense we are rolling forward the money. The money follows the change in the age group. I do not think it specifically is an issue for HE so much; though as we succeed in moving an expansion of the number of people who go into HE, then the resource issue will follow, but I think in both post 16 generally and HE in particular it is entirely possible to foresee resources coming in from other areas in the ways that we want to see. If you see some of the new foundation degrees which are being established, for example, there is a significant contribution from the relevant employers in that area, and we are hoping, of course, with our modern apprenticeships and the rest of it, to get significant employer contribution. Q177 Chairman: There seem to be two opportunities that have been presented to this Committee. One is that as this demographic change takes place you can use the large number of primary school teachers that will be trained and find it more difficult to get a job, and are already finding that, but you could also use that in terms of the Early Years where there is a dearth of highly trained, especially teacher‑trained, personnel in that Early Years situation. Is there any ambition to do anything in that area? Mr Clarke: Absolutely. You are entirely correct. Without revealing significant details of our proposals, we have already announced the commitment towards extended schools which does bring together children's services in a wide variety of different ways and extends the capacity of the school to offer services to the local community in a wider range, but also we have announced the significant expansion in what we are doing for under fives, and we will continue to do that; and, as you correctly imply, both in terms of the physical building in the case of primary schools with less numbers of pupils and in the case of the staff, not just teachers but non‑teaching staff as well, there is a potential there for ensuring that our whole under‑five offer is improved in a very significant way, which is a major priority of the Government. So in answer to the dilemma which you indicate, my own belief is that as you get falling rolls at the bottom end of the age range that resource would get switched to under‑fives and to the extended school function in that area rather than teachers, as it were, being redeployed into FEs, what I expect to be the main thrust of what happens. Q178 Chairman: You have just said that this is an all party
Committee, and it is, and our job is to look at the way in which tax‑payers'
money is spent in a way that gives value for money. That is our one of our central missions. When we look at expenditure on education,
many of us every time we see an increase in expenditure throw our hats in the
air and say, "Hurrah. Mr Clarke: My view is that higher spending and higher investment is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for education improvement and performance. It is a necessary condition because the number of teachers, non‑teaching staff working in a particular school or college is a significant factor. Training of teachers, continued professional development, which costs money, is significant factor, so that teachers improve, and basics like the facilities that are in a school, the ICT that is available and so on, can reinforce performance, but it is not a sufficient condition because it is entirely possible to have all that but for it not to be focused properly on improving educational standards in the way that we all want to see, and any survey of different schools throughout the country will show that there are schools with similar social issues ‑ free school meals, for example, or resources being broadly similar - which are achieving dramatically different results for their children, and that is why we have to focus on a reform agenda which tries to raise that performance and carry it through. I am not one of those who believes you simply pump in more money and that solves the problem ‑ I do not think it does ‑ but I do think you need more money for many of the things which obviously we see around. Q179 Chairman: But it is quite surprising, when you look from 1990 to 1995 ‑ 1991, 1994 and 1995 ‑ and we look at the five GSE grades A to C, the improvement was plus 6.7 in that period. The increase in real terms was 11.4 per cent. So you get an 11.4 per cent increase in expenditure, a 6.7 increase in improvement in grades. Then you move to what I think is the most interesting middle period, 1994 to 1999, and you see only a 3.4 per cent increase in current expenditure in real terms, but you get a plus 4.4 increase in grades A to C. That is the central conundrum. Then the latest, 1988 to 2003, you get a five per cent increase ‑ not much more than the previous period ‑ a five per cent increase in grades at A to C, with a 31.6 increase in expenditure. How do you explain that middle band? Mr Clarke: I am noting down the figures as you go, but, simply by reference to what I said earlier, I do not think there is a direct linear relationship between expenditure and performance. I simply do not think that is the case. If you take the different faces that you are describing and the description you have just given, the first phase you are talking about, I would argue, was a period when there was a significantly demoralised education in the world which existed, which did not feel motivated and positive about what it was trying to achieve, whatever resource went in. I think the period after Labour was elected in 1997 led to an increase in morale, but also an increase in concern. We were making many changes which gave rise to concerns in some people, and I think we have now moved to a situation of steady progress and stabilisation which I think is delivering the kind of results you are describing. Q180 Chairman: But the low morale period produced the best result in terms of value for money. John Major's years, only a 3.4 increase in expenditure, gave a 4.4 increase in grades? Mr Clarke: I was taking that as half being the Conservative period and half the New Labour Government coming in, but I may be wrong on what you are saying. It is difficult to have this debate without the full figures we are talking about. I think the general point I want to make, Chairman, is that money is important, but those who say that money is the solution I do not agree with at the end of the day. Money is an important part of the solution, but it is not the only part of the solution; and there is evidence that money not being spent in the best possible way, which we try and deal with in various respects and we try and improve where we are, which is why we signed up to the Gershwin Proposals on Efficiency, and so on, to try and get the best value out of our money, but the single most important factor in delivering our result is the morale, engagement, capacity of all the people who work in education who are the vast majority of the expenditure that we do. That is why we have to focus on that in particular. Q181 Mr Gibb: Secretary of State, I want to follow on from the Chairman's questioning, because the issue here is: is this expenditure properly focused on improving attainment? And I was interested in your answers to his questions about expenditure: "It is a necessary but not a sufficient condition." I totally agree with that - you do need expenditure to pay the proper salaries to teachers so you get the quality of teaching that we want in our schools and continue to have in our schools - but you also said that you have schools with broadly similar social intakes, free school meals, etcetera, that are getting widely differing results. My question is: how are you focusing that money to ensure that those schools that are not delivering these results do? Mr Clarke: Two things. Firstly, money and, secondly, management focus, if I can put it like that. As far as the money is concerned, there is a whole string of funding streams that we established, Excellence in Cities being the well‑known one, the Mutual Incentive Grant, the behaviour money, which is focusing on some of the parts of the country and the types of schools where there have historically been the lowest results. I was very pleased, for example with the GCSEs last year, to see that schools in those areas were doing better that the average and indicating some success simply looking at the money aspect of what has gone on. Secondly, in both our Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 strategies, we are focusing directly and explicitly on the particular schools which are performing at less than the level they ought to be and less than the medium for their particular free school meal bands. So we are identifying in a particular LEA which are the schools which are performing less well than they ought to be and providing training and management support to enable them to address the steps they have to take to try and move it forward. So we do try and target in both those ways. One is a slightly blunt instrument; the other is much more focused on the areas where we are not getting the best 'bets for our bucks', if I can put it like that, in terms of educational output. Q182 Mr Gibb: In the Labour Manifesto in 1987 Labour said, the Government said, they were going to concentrate less on structural changes and much more on obtaining within schools, and things like setting was one of those issues. Do you think you have made improvements in the amount of setting in secondary schools? Mr Clarke: I do not know what the figures are at the moment. I would be pretty surprised if there was not more setting now than there was then. Q183 Mr Gibb: There is slightly more. Mr Clarke: We have tried, in a variety of ways, to encourage those kinds of approaches. The house system is something that people have talked about as well from that point of view. So there are areas there, but at the end of the day this is a matter for the professionalism of teachers. The question for us is how we encourage and develop the professionalism of teachers in each of those areas, and new institutions like the National College of School Leadership were particularly defined and created in order to try and promote those types of approaches in a much more creative way. I was talking yesterday, by chance, with somebody I met at the Lord Chancellor's party, a bursar of a small primary school, who talked about the course she had been on at the National College of School Leadership and her ability to transform the finances of this small school and get more resource and more value for money. She said she had saved £28,000 in the small school which she then could spend on more positive things. That is a small example, an anecdotal case of course, of the way that institution, the National College of School Leadership, had instantly improved performance and value for money. Q184 Mr Gibb: I do not want to overdose on this issue: I will just ask one more question on the setting issue. You did say in the Manifesto ‑ you said this was an issue for the professionalism of teachers, but I wonder why it was in the Labour Manifesto to do something about setting, and 60 per cent of lessons now are still in mixed ability classes? Mr Clarke: The reason why we put it in the Manifesto is that we stated that is what we thought ought to happen. We then asked ourselves the question, having stated it, do we try and do anything to encourage that? And so we do. We set up organisations like the National College I mentioned, like the Key Stage 3 strategy ‑ a set of different initiatives which are interventionist, and I make no apology for that, because it was necessary to drive things forward in that way and they made a positive different. Do I think we were wrong in what we did? No, I do not. I think it was the right thing to do. Do I think we should pass a law and say all schools shall be set in ways A, B and C? I do not think that either. I do not think that would be an intelligent way to go, but I think it is perfectly reasonable for a political party to set out to the electorate how it wants to see improvement in the areas of key public services. Q185 Mr Gibb: You mentioned Key Stage 2. I wonder whether we are getting value for money in Key Stage 2 as well in recent years. There is no doubt the literacy strategy did improve reading in the Early Years, but then it seems to have stagnated from 2000 onwards with 75 per cent of 11 year-olds achieving Level 4. Is the money going into the right areas in primary schools as well? Why have we got this plateau of 75 per cent? Mr Clarke: We think it is going into the right areas, but you are quite right, the flat‑lining in the main case two indicators is perhaps my single greatest area of concern across the whole of the policy of the department, and we have worked very hard to try and improve it. There are some technical explanations for that, but, even so, that does not reduce the power of your point in any respect whatsoever. We have worked very hard in precisely the way I have described to target the lower performance schools in their particular area and I hope we will see improvements. The only thing to say is we made a significant improvement right away and we are now dealing with groups of children where the issues are more difficult to resolve than was the case right at the beginning. There was a serious low attainment point and large numbers of children throughout the country were not getting to those basic levels then who, with a relatively small adjustment, were able to do that, and so literacy and numeracy made that change. We are now moving into groups of children where that is less easy to achieve and so it will be a long and difficult process to be able to achieve what we have to do, but I do not think that that should move us towards a cynical approach that says there is nothing we can do about this, we just leave it to the luck of the gods, because the responsibility we have to the children who are not easily performing at AS2 level is fundamental, and many of our key problems in older people now with literacy and innumeracy in large numbers is due to failures in the past, and I simply have an absolute responsibility to try and get this right. We are ready to say maybe we have done it wrong in area A, B or C and listen to what people have to say to take it forward, but what I am not prepared to concede is that we should not somehow be trying to press and drive this forward in the strongest way that we can. There is plenty of room, as I say, for not trying an argument about whether we are doing in it in the right way, and I am happy to engage in that discussion, but the argument that somehow we should not have targets or we should not be involved in this approach, just let's leave it to whatever to come round, I cannot identify with. Q186 Mr Gibb: Where do you stand on the phonics on language to date? Mr Clarke: I have had interest both in my constituency in Norwich and a number of people are arguing in this. I have listened to the presentations that are made. I have put all those who have made representations to me in contact with the people in our department and elsewhere who are dealing with these matters, and there is a debate that is taking place. I do not think it is appropriate for me as Secretary of State to say that this is the precise teaching method that should be used, and, to be candid, I am not at all sure that I consider myself professionally qualified to say this is the right way that it should happen. That is why I said what I said earlier. I welcomed genuine discussion about what was the best way to deal with it, but the professionals at the end of the day have to resolve the best way of making progress. Q187 Mr Gibb: Coming back to expenditure, the future figures for expenditure do not look as high as the last few years: 3.8 per cent in 6/7, 3.5 per cent in 7/8. Will this mean that you will not have the necessary expenditure to continue raising standards? Mr Clarke: I think two things. We certainly will have the necessary expenditure. We have got money there. There is an increase in real terms, as you have just indicated, coming through, and that is what is needed and what is necessary, but - it is the point that I made to the Chairman - if I were relying on expenditure alone, I would say we will make relatively slow progress. So I have to rely on more than just expenditure. I have to rely on improving professional standards, reform and all those areas that carry through, and that is precisely what we try and do. The second point is that getting value for money out of that expenditure is very important and making sure the money is well spent; and there have been many representations to us that we ought to be trying to give heads or governors of schools a much clearer sight of how they can use their spending to improve results. That is why the Prime Minister announced at the National Association of Head Teachers Conference at Easter that we were committed to three‑year budgets for schools at the same time going with the school year, because we felt, on the basis of a large number of points made to us, that using that money in a very positive way and being able to plan ahead as to what you achieve will be a major part of the change. So I think the money that has been allocated is certainly sufficient for what we have to do, but it is a question of improving where we use it. Q188 Mr Gibb: Finally, would it be better value to fund all schools directly rather than through local education authorities? Mr Clarke: I do not think so myself. I think the idea of trying to fund 26,000 schools by a National Funding Agency is difficult to see how that would work well. I think local authorities have a very important role to play, both in strategic leadership and in allocating resources, and many of the newspaper reports recently about what we are thinking about is wide of the mark. We want to give a very strong role to local authorities in what they do and carry it through because the idea that the Department for Education and Skills could press a button here and sort it out there I think is the wrong view. So I think local authorities should continue to be the vehicle through which education is funded in that way. What I do think is that we want to achieve certainty in the funding regimes, which is why we have had the passporting regimes thus far; and I am in favour of strengthening that certainty that can be offered by ensuring that money that is intended for schools does go to schools and then to strengthen it even further by establishing a three‑year budget regime for each school so that they can use the money in the way you have described; and that does require, or imply, I should say, some changes in the balance of the relationship. Some people have argued, as you imply, I do not know if it is the Conservative position, that there should be a National Funding Agency for all schools. I do not myself think that is a feasible way of doing it in an effective way. I think local government should be and should continue to be the system by which schools are funded. Q189 Chairman: When we did our inquiry into school funding some time ago we suggested that your response had been ‑ we criticised you because you had tried to pass the buck on to local authorities. We thought, very clearly, it was not local authorities, and the evidence that has come in I think strongly suggests "It was not their fault, Guv", it was your fault as a department. We also suggested that your response had been a bit of a sticking plaster job that would last perhaps for a year or two but the same problems would come back to haunt you. Are you satisfied you have now got it right? Mr Clarke: Half. I did not accept your criticism at the time and I do not accept it now. Q190 Chairman: Which one? Mr Clarke: The one that, "It was all my fault, Guv". Q191 Chairman: What about the first part that you did try and blame local authorities, did you not? Mr Clarke: Not really. I said ‑ I can't recall the formal ‑ I will send you the text, if you are interested, but what I said at the time was that the funding of schools was a shared responsibility between local government and the DfES and that both bore responsibility. That was interpreted in some sources as me blaming local government, which I did not think was a fair thing to say. Q192 Chairman: The Deputy Prime Minister seemed to take that view, did he not? Mr Clarke: The Deputy Prime Minister is a very wise man! I am glad to say we have a full and frank conversation on many issues at many times, but, taking your question seriously, I think it was extreme to say that it was a sticking plaster job. The fact is we have achieved a situation where funding for this year (04/05) is, broadly speaking, stable, that local government has worked well with local schools in their areas to eliminate deficits and carry them through; and the funding that we have given for that has been used in general very constructively and we have got to a situation where people have felt for 04/05 we are on a reasonably stable basis. We then have to go to 05/06, where precisely the same issues come around, as to whether we can passport effectively how we carry it through and what kind of minimum guarantee we establish and take it forward, and we will see how that goes. I am confident when we make the announcement about 05/06 we will be able to carry it through again based on that partnership between the Department and local government. You are quite right; I think it is quite a ram shackle system in the way that it operates and does not give schools the certainty that they want about where they are going, which is why the Prime Minister announced that we want to move to a change, as I say, of three-year budgets which are based on the school year. I intend that we will announce proposals to get to that state of affairs, so that in place of the ‑ I do not accept the word "sticking plaster", but‑‑ Q193 Chairman: You said "ram shackle". They are pretty close, are they not? Mr Clarke: Okay. You are the engineer more than I, but let's just say ram shackle is the word I used and sticking plaster is the word you used. Sticking plaster implies first‑aid, ram shackle implies it is a structural problem that is there in the system, and I do not know anybody who, in defence of the current systems of local government finance, is perfect and it certainly has led to issues for schools, which is why we want to make proposals to change that in the way that I have implied and as set out by the Prime Minister over Easter, and we will make proposals in that direction to try and give schools the certainty, first, that money will come through, money intended for education does come through to education, and, secondly, to ensure that each school has its own budget on a three‑years basis where it can plan and develop and see where it is going, and that is the essence of where we are. Some interpret that as a proposal to take local authorities out of education. That is not the case. We believe that local authorities have a very major role in education both in relation to the strategic role and in relation to distribution locally and in relation to school improvement, and, most important of all, in the development of the children's trust approach, which is central to everything that we are doing; and I will set that out very clearly when I make a statement on that shortly. Chairman: I want to stay with school funding for a second and bring Jeff Ennis in, and then I will go back to the spending budgets with David Chaytor. Q194 Jeff Ennis: Thank you, Chairman. Charles, in terms of the schools funding issue, David Normington in recent evidence to us indicated that obviously a number of schools have been suffering from a deficit budget situation, and he quoted that the latest statistics from March 2003, before the funding problems occurred, showed that we had approximately 2,500 schools nationally in a deficit situation. Has that situation stabilised now since March 2003? Has it got better or worse? Mr Clarke: It has improved significantly, because what we did was we provided a fund to all local education authorities which indicated there were schools in the position that you described, Mr Ennis, and asked them to discuss with those particular schools a funding package which would bring them out of deficit either in one year or two years to get them to a state of affairs where that issue could be addressed. All local education authorities have now done that, and they have addressed the situation in their area and have agreed plans with the schools in their locality to bring them out of deficit. In my own county, Norfolk, for example, the county council made an announcement just a couple of weeks ago about what the exact amounts of money were for each school to take them out of that situation; and the highest amount of money given to an individual school was nearly three‑quarters of a million pounds, which is a very significant amount of money to deal with the situation and take it out, and certainly my county council has addressed the question with the money we provided very constructively with local schools. I believe that is happening throughout the country with every LEA, and is therefore significant in reducing that March 2003 figure which you set out. That is not to say there will not still be problems, but I think we have been able to address what has been a systemic problem, in some cases acute in some schools, in a very strong to way. Q195 Jeff Ennis: We have already spoken about the Government plans for increased expenditure up to 2005/6. Will schools funding be allocated after that according to the Formula Spending Share, or will you be looking for some other mechanism for distributing? Mr Clarke: Principally by the Formula Spending Share the idea is to get to a state of affairs where the formulae reflect what the overall position... I may have misunderstood the question. Are you talking about the allocation to individual schools or the allocation to local education authorities? Q196 Jeff Ennis: Both actually. Mr Clarke: Let me take them separately. Let me deal with the allocation to local education authorities. We are hoping to bring together the Formula Spending Share allocation for LEAs on the various formulae we know together with our standards fund, which are more targeted, into one stream of funding where everybody knows where they are, rather than having separate bidding streams; and so it will strongly reflect the Formula Spending Share but it will not only be about the Formula Spending Share because of the targeting, which I was referring to in my answer to Mr Gibb earlier on. Secondly, when you get down to the individual schools the local authority will have its own local formula for distribution locally and will be constrained in that by some of the requirements we place about funding schools with particular difficulties and particular issues. So that will not be a pure formula locally, it will reflect the priorities which national government is setting in those areas; so both those areas will have a combination of a formula plus a targeted funding. Q197 Jeff Ennis: We have already referred to the fact that over the next three years the actual real in terms increase in schools funding is going to drop quite drastically by six percent in 2005/6 to 3.5 per cent in 2007/8 and Nick Gibb asked a question on this; but in my perception, will that be perceived, do you think, as a cut when it comes to the heads allocating the budget for those future years, and do you anticipate that there will be further problems with schools funding because of this, and what advice will you be giving to schools to manage expectations on budgets? Mr Clarke: Firstly, I think it would be absolutely wrong to describe it as a cut. A cut is a minus figure in real terms, and if there were to be a cut in real terms that is a real issue of concern. The only areas where that could conceivably arise without minimum guarantees is in areas of falling rolls, and, even there, we have established a basic bottom line, even in those situations, to prevent cuts taking place. So anybody who described it as a cut, in my opinion, would be seeking to be deliberately misleading. Secondly, we have had unprecedented - I use that word advisedly - increases year on year in recent years in school funding. I have never expected that that would continue indefinitely at those levels, and I think anybody who did would be mistaken. Thirdly, I think there are serious issues implied in the last part of your question about the management of the resource and expectations, as you rightly say. I myself think that one of the key areas, an area, by the way, Chairman, for which I have taken responsibility because it was a mistake that was made, is in raising expectations about what the money ‑ what the financial situation would be so that people somehow thought you could go on, and go on, and go on without facing up to that situation. I believe the financial management regimes that we have put in place since the issues last year mean that is far less likely and that schools will be able to manage their situation through, but I again come back to the point: if we are able to establish three‑year budgets in the way that I have said, that will make it much easier for schools to know where they stand. At the moment they are not quite certain what is coming next year. They hear things. There is a contingency. "Maybe we should be prepared to lay off a teaching system to whatever it might be because we do not quite know what is coming through." Then a bit of transitional funding comes up. "That's okay", so there we are. It is not a satisfactory way of proceeding, which is why we need to get on to the proper three‑year budgeting arrangements that I was describing, and that is what we will do. Q198 Jeff Ennis: One final possibly wider question, Chairman, moving away from schools funding. The Department itself, Charles, has become notorious over recent years for quite large under‑spends at the end of the yearly budget situation. There has obviously been a variety of reasons for that occurring in each of the different years. Are we going to be a situation again this year where we have got a significant‑‑ Mr Clarke: I do not think so. I have been working very energetically to reduce the idea of under‑spend. I am strongly of the view that money exists to be spent rather than to be under‑spent, and I know that is the view of the Committee. There are perfectly good reasons why it arose at each juncture, and I understand those and I make no criticism in saying so, but the Department is working very hard indeed to ensure we are not in that position. I hope very much that we are not; in fact I would like to say I am confident that we will not be in a position of repeating that state of affairs. Q199 Mr Chaytor: Secretary of State, does the Department still believe in evidence‑based policy making? Mr Clarke: Yes. Q200 Mr Chaytor: What is the evidence for the expansion of the academies? Mr Clarke: The evidence is that... Well, on that basis there is very little evidence, because the academies are so new. The evidence that exists is that where there has been very low educational attainment, and in all the academy areas it is particularly predicated on essentially educational failure in the past, that is what the academy is all about, what you need is, firstly, a transformation, which means often a new school with new leadership and new approaches, and, secondly, very substantial resource, and, thirdly, a confidence by people in that community that education is important by going for world class facilities. In each of those statements, without citing chapter and verse, I think I can prove to you that there is evidence for the correctness of each of those assertions as being major aspects of educational transformation where the failure has been so acute. As I say, the change, the leadership, the commitment of resource, the status given to education. On each of these I think there is evidence. In the city academy programme we are seeking to bring those together. If you then ask: what is evidence of the success or otherwise of the city academy programme so far? It is very little. I think I am speaking, I think I am right in saying there are only 12 schools that are currently up and running, and none of them have been long enough to make a systemic assessment of what has happened in those areas. Some of them have had significant difficulties in getting started, as one would expect with a programme which is as radical as it is. The CTCs when they were around, and some of those are coming into the academy regime, have had a genuine record of success in their particular locality, which I think there is evidence for what they have done. They are not the same as the academies but for a variety of different reasons, but I think I can claim quite fundamentally that the principles of the academy form of organisation in dealing with areas where there has been immense educational failure and deprivation are well‑established by evidence, and I hope that when the city academy programme has been going for a few years the evidence of how it is run will reinforce that; but I concede to you that that is a hope at this stage rather than evidence I can offer. Q201 Mr Chaytor: But the 2004 departmental report says the first assessment of the first the wave of academies will be published later in 2004, and yet today the Prime Minister is going to raise the expansion to 200 academies. Would it not have made more sense, if you do believe in evidence‑based policy making, to wait for the assessment of the first wave before announcing the expansion? Mr Clarke: You can argue that. The problem about any process of policy announcement is there is a timetable in which one is set, and we, in my opinion quite rightly, are going through a process of announcing a five‑year programme on the timetable that we are. Does that mean we should postpone that announcement in general in every respect of where we go on the CSR process? I do not think it can, because we have a programme of seeking to make progress in those areas. If you say to me that when the evidence exists in this form we should revise where we are, of course we should take account of evidence as it comes through, but I do not think we should simply postpone any announcements about it. Q202 Mr Chaytor: It puts a question mark over the validity of the assessment later this year. It is now inconceivable that the first annual assessment of the academies programme would highlight any major weaknesses, because that would undermine the whole policy of expanding to 200 academies, surely? Mr Clarke: No, it is not inconceivable at all, because the assessment... It would be absolutely foolish for a government not to say in truth what the situation was with a programme, in this case the City Academies programme. I could point, you could point to areas where there have been significant difficulties in the academies getting going and starting. That is undoubtedly the case, and that would be the case, by the way, for any new school in those areas of major educational disadvantage. You are talking about an absolute transformation. Does that lead me to have any lack of confidence in my ability to make the changes? Not in the slightest, but I think it would be fool‑hardy ‑ and I certainly do not do this and nobody else does this either ‑ to say, "Here is the magic want I wave. We bestow on this area where there has been educational deprivation for decades a solution", the City Academy in this case, "which will suddenly at a stroke resolve all this." It does not happen like that. Q203 Mr Chaytor: If the report later this year does identify strong weaknesses, will that lead to a change in government policy about the expansion of the programme? Mr Clarke: It will certainly lead to a very serious assessment of what the Government is doing in the programme, and the way in which the programme works, as it should, and that will be the case in any particular areas to keep us up to date about our case two flat‑lining. When we analyse the reasons for that it goes through, see what happens this year, we will look very carefully at what our policies are in that area. It would be completely foolish not to so; but does that mean we are frozen and say we can nothing about anything at any given point? I do not think it does. Q204 Mr Chaytor: One of the other things the Prime Minister is likely to say today is that over‑subscribed schools will be allowed to expand. If over‑subscribed schools are allowed to expand, under‑subscribed schools must inevitably contract. How do you reconcile that policy with your concern to get financial stability across all schools? Mr Clarke: There is a general constraint right across the whole system on resources which have to be allocated at the level of the local authority whether it is for capital development for new places, or whatever it might be, or, indeed, for revenue, but the system already in its revenue reflects where students are, and so schools do fluctuate in size, I think quite rightly, to meet what parental assessments are of the schools in their particular area. The question is whether there should be any capacity for schools which are doing well to expand if the resources are available. I think that should be the case. Do I think it will make a dramatic difference in any given locality, in Bury, for example, and Norwich? Not very much actually, but I think having that flexibility, of course, is beneficial. Q205 Mr Chaytor: Surely, if there is a ten per cent expansion in some schools there must be a 10 per cent contraction in other schools. There is a fixed number of pupils? Mr Clarke: Yes, of course. Q206 Mr Chaytor: So how is the funding formula going to protect the schools that are contracting? Mr Clarke: The funding formula already deals with the situation exactly as it has been for years: that the funding is for less number of students. That is the fundamental principle that is there, and that is right, in my opinion. I am not aware of any significant argument that that is the right way to do it, and that remains. The question is whether the schools that are doing well should have the capacity to expand or not in those circumstances. I think there should be much more flexibility in the system than there now is to allow schools to be able to expand in those circumstances. But, you are right, any given expansion has an implication on the rest of the system, not ten per cent, because if you have got one primary school expanding in a local authority of 30 primary schools, or whatever it might be, the ten per cent increase in numbers in that particular primary school does not mean a ten per cent decrease in numbers in the rest of the system; it means, whatever, a third of the one per cent reduction in the numbers across the system. So it is the balance that arises that has to be addressed by the organisation committee, and the local authority in those circumstances, and that is right. Q207 Mr Chaytor: The fact remains that a contracting school is going to see a reduction in its budget. Mr Clarke: As happens exactly now. Q208 Mr Chaytor: Yes, but it is going to be exacerbated in the future because you are allowing greater flexibility. Mr Clarke: Firstly, it is exactly what happens now. Secondly, yes, because we have allowed greater flexibility in the way that I am suggesting, it will be exacerbated, as you describe. Q209 Mr Chaytor: Will there be some new mechanism to give stability to contracting schools? Mr Clarke: Certainly, there is the mechanism that exists at the moment. When you say "a new mechanism", the implication of your question, Mr Chaytor, is that there is a qualitative shift in the proposal to allow schools to expand compared to the current status quo, and that is simply not the case. There is a shift because it is implying greater flexibility, but it is not a qualitative shift in what happens. It is already the situation. I do not know the situation in Bury, but if you look at school numbers at schools in Bury - actual school numbers I mean - they would already be going up and down according to a series of different factors. What we are saying is put in more flexibility, which I accept exacerbates the changes which take place but I do not think it takes it on to a new plane, and nor do I think it is anything like as dramatic as some fear, but having grater flexibility in the system will make it work better for the parents. Q210 Mr Chaytor: Lastly, Chairman, can I ask does anybody in the department know the cost of administering the current admissions system across the country? Mr Clarke: Perhaps I can ask a question back. I do not know if we gave evidence to your Committee on that in the inquiry you have just been doing. If we are asked that question I do not know the answer to the question as you ask it now, but I am happy to write to the Committee about it. Q211 Mr Chaytor: The answer to a PQ I submitted just a few days ago was that no, the department does not collect that information. So the issue is, should somebody not be assessing what it costs to manage the current admissions system? Mr Clarke: I think it is a very interesting process to do. We are waiting for your Committee's report on this very issue. We will respond carefully when it comes around. I am grateful to you for reminding me of my answer to the question that you have asked. The reason why we do not know is presumably that this is a matter which is run locally in the way that we do and should reflect the data in that way. You could argue we should but there is an implication in terms of resource and bureaucratic burden which applies to that which is presumably why we have not done it so far. I will look at it and I am happy to consider the point. Q212 Mr Chaytor: If the Prime Minister today is going to announce that more schools can become their own admission authorities, would it not be a good idea to know what the cost of administering the system is before making such an announcement? Mr Clarke: To some extent, but I do not think I will overstate that point because every school will be bound by the code of admissions; no school will be allowed to be selective in its entry and in the way that it operates. We are not going down the lines other political parties are going down in saying that every school should be its own admissions authority and they will establish whatever selection criteria it wants irrespective of any other situation. In fact, we reject that line completely; we think it would be quite wrong to go down that path. So, again, I think, the implication is nothing like as substantial as you may be concerned about, but I will look at this cost issue and see if there is an issue there that needs to be resolved. I suppose I would want to say that we think the adjudicator system has worked relatively well in various circumstances, but I am genuinely, Chairman, waiting for the report of the Committee. You complained on the Today programme last Friday that we had not shared the five-year plan with you in the process, and I took the rebuke in good heart, but I am in the same position as well with what you are about to recommend on selection admissions. As I do not know what you are going to recommend I cannot comment in detail, but the commitment I can give is the one I gave right at the beginning, that we take it very, very seriously and will respond properly, including on the issue of costs that Mr Chaytor has just raised. Q213 Chairman: Secretary of State, we could whet your appetite in the sense that there are unintended consequences. What people do want is clarity on what the Government's policies are. If the Government is elected on a policy of not expanding grammar schools and we see an allowance for grammar schools to change from - when we came into power - 117,000 pupils to now over 150,000 pupils (in the age group that is a 3.1 per cent to 4.6 per cent growth in grammar schools) people might say that was not really what we thought the Government intended in 1997. That is, perhaps, an unintended consequence of allowing institutions to grow willy-nilly. Mr Clarke: That is a reasonable point for the Committee to make. As I say, I shall await your report and study it carefully when you do publish on that question. As far as the general issue of clarity is concerned, I could not agree more, which is why we are intending shortly to announce as clearly as we can what our policies are for the next five years so that people can make their assessment of them and, in particular, I hope, this Committee will make its assessment of them, with its strengths and weaknesses in whatever way you think right. Q214 Chairman: That has whetted your appetite? Mr Clarke: It has, yes; I am looking forward to it. Q215 Jeff Ennis: Just as a supplementary to follow on your answer, Charles, in terms of the potential expansion of academy schools, I can understand and I agree with the logic behind that expansion as you have outlined it to us. Indeed, in relation to my two local LEAs, Barnsley is looking at the possibility of establishing an academy in Wosborough (?) and Doncaster are looking at the possibility of establishing an academy at Northcliffe, Conisbrough. So I can understand the logic as you described it. I really want further reassurance from you, Charles. If I can put a hypothetical situation to you, if you had an LEA which had a mixture of reasonably good schools and one or two failing schools, where the academy scenario might fit into part of the area, if the LEA came forward with a grandiose plan to close all the secondary schools and create all new academies within their LEA area, how would the DfES react to that particular model when that came forward? Mr Clarke: I would like to agree simply on the resources basis but it is not remote from reality. The London Borough of Hackney is not a long way from the situation you have just described. It is committing the London Borough of Hackney to trying to get a significant number of city academies in the borough for exactly the implication that you are giving there, and part of our whole approach to the London Challenge has been to encourage a total renewal of the educational offer that is available in those areas. I think I want to say two things, if I may, Chairman. There is a confusion in the public debate about this and one of the problems about it, and I am not criticising the media on this occasion - I do that in private - is that there has been a series of links going on (?) which confuses the two strands. Strand one is the city academy programme which I was trying to describe in answer to Mr Chaytor, which is, as it were, a bazooka which is designed to transform education opportunity in areas where education attainment has been very low, and you have given a couple of examples in your area of areas where that is needed. There are resource restraints on that, which is a serious issue to be addressed, and we are trying in those areas to say we really have got to turn this around because of years of failure, and we think the way to do it is in the various answers I gave to Mr Chaytor in the form of a city academy. That is one strand of discussion, to which the Government is committing. There is another strand which is about freedoms of schools and the way they can operate and the decisions that they take. You could describe those as academy style freedoms, if I can put it like that, but it is about principally giving schools the ability to really focus on the problems that they have to solve - yes, working in collaboration and working with the rest of the community, and so on. Something we do want to see generally across the system is schools able to take those freedoms, and the one that is most significant is the ability to have a three-year budget and move it forward, but one can imagine others as well. Those are two separate things which have got confused in the word "academy" in terms of the debate that has been flowing around. I am grateful for the opportunity to just try and set out as clearly as I can the difference between these two things. In neither case are we talking about the development of a new elite of schools, which some people have been concerned about - that there would be some group of schools which was a new elite. In fact, my first act as Secretary of State, as the Committee will recall, was to open specialist school status to all schools that wished to do so rather than being in competition with each other, precisely because I wanted to see it as a device which could mobilise all schools rather than create a sub-group of schools which was an elite of that kind. I am absolutely committed to the view that we have to transform schools and performance across the range rather than saying there is some group in that area. You have not used this word but it is perverse to think of the city academies as an elite in that sense, because though they are an elite in the sense of significant resources, and so on, they are not educating an elite in any sense of the word whatsoever, they are educating people from the poorest performing parts of the country in what they do, and that is what they are trying to change. Q216 Jeff Ennis: I am a bit nervous about that reply in terms of the fact that it would be possible, then, given the response you have just given to me, for an LEA to try and get more resource into their area over and above their neighbouring LEAs by just trying to set up a series of academies within their area. Mr Clarke: But they have to have that agreed by the Secretary of State. That is the situation, but actually the real truth is that the main programme in all of this is the Building Schools for the Future programme for secondary schools, which is a programme which has universal aspiration right across the country for every single secondary school where we have a defined period at the end where, we hope, we will have transformed schools in the country. Academies sit within that, and they are not, as it were, apart from it. So in the case of Barnsley, for the sake of argument, Barnsley will, at some point, be a Building Schools for the Future authority which is transforming all its secondary schools to world-class standards. That is the investment which the Chancellor announced in the Budget which is very positive. So it would not be rational for Barnsley to think, "Well if we bid for all academies then somehow we can accelerate that process." Nor would it be rational for any Secretary of State - me or anybody else - to agree that for Barnsley in that way because we think the Building Schools for the Future programme is the device to carry that through. Q217 Chairman: Secretary of State, just on that very point of academies, Jeff Ennis, the previous time you were here, used to complain that with specialist schools the £50,000 to be raised from private resources was very difficult in a place like his constituency which has some of the poorest wards in the country. As I understand it, the earlier academies all needed quite a big injection of private sector investment, which was not £50,000 but more like £3 million. Mr Clarke: Two million. Q218 Chairman: Will that be necessary for all these other academies? Mr Clarke: That is what we are talking about, yes, and I think it is a very positive thing, actually, both in terms of the actual money, which is important but, also, in terms of the relationship with the school and so on. That money comes not from the local community, normally speaking, but from a sponsor, and the sponsors are precisely ready to invest money in the lowest educationally performing parts of the country because they believe that is the right thing to do, and I pay tribute to the fact that they do that. So it is not similar to the specialist school programme in the sense that it is the specialist school saying, "How can we raise £50,000" (as you know, I set up, together with the Specialist Schools Trust, a fund where that could be dealt with); it is more sponsors saying, "We are ready to put money in with you to really try and improve educational performance in a particular area of low educational achievement." Q219 Chairman: There are two concerns, Secretary of State, about that. One is that sponsors do get a great deal; they put money in and get a very expensive piece of educational equipment, if you like - an academy is an expensive piece of infrastructure. Historically, people quite like it: if you are Ford and it is Dagenham you have got a link; if it is ICI in Huddersfield, historically there was a link; and you can see the Halifax Bank in Halifax. However, there are a lot of places that do not have that proximity to large businesses. Will that not be much more of a struggle? Mr Clarke: It will be, but many people are prepared to put money in because they believe in the ideal that I have described, of trying to transform educational performance in a particular area of historically low attainment. Also, if I am being candid, Chairman, the extent to which major employers - of the type you have described, which have particular links with particular localities (I can think of those in my own constituency) - have actually put serious resources into their local schools has been pretty limited. The specialist schools movement is helping that, to some extent, but I think there is a lot more that could be done here. Q220 Chairman: There has been a concern expressed that the academies open the door to faith organisations, particularly Evangelical Christian groups, getting a very large expansion in our urban centres through the route of academies. That is a concern that I have picked up, and I think other people have picked up. Is that something that concerns you? Mr Clarke: Not really. It has arisen specifically around one particular sponsor of the city academies, and it is absolutely clear the National Curriculum is taught; it should be taught and that is how it operates. I think that is the right way to approach it. Now, if there was any sense of that National Curriculum being diverted for the reasons that you are implying, that would be a matter of concern. It would be a matter not just of concern but a matter that Ofsted would have to look at when it was looking at the schools and carrying it through. I would certainly be concerned about that, but I have to say I have no evidence in any sense whatsoever that that is happening. I know the concern is there and I understand why you are reflecting it. Q221 Chairman: It would worry you, would it not, if the born again Evangelical group had a series of academies in, as you said, urban deprived areas where, as we know, very high numbers of people living there are not of the British faith (?)? Mr Clarke: It is not so much the Christian Evangelical thing which is the issue; if the teaching in the school - that is the issue upon which I would focus - were suggesting that science, as a way of looking at the world, was flawed and wrong and that we should be anti-scientific in the way we look at things, I would be concerned. If there was a view that somehow science was not the right way to try and understand the world in which we live, I think that would be very damaging indeed. I think that would be a matter I would expect Ofsted to pick up in its review, and I would take any concerns of that kind very seriously. So my concern, Chairman, would be about what is actually going on in the school and what the children are being taught in these areas; it would not be about the identity of the sponsor of the city academy, if I can put it like that. The test which would be real for me, and would give rise, certainly as Secretary of State today, to concerns if I thought it were the case, would be if teaching was taking place in the curriculum which was undermining the scientific base of where we stand today. It would be a matter of concern. Q222 Chairman: In the City of Birmingham, which the Committee knows very well, in which ethnic minority origin pupils are over 40 per cent, you would not worry that a number of academies would come from that particular ---- Mr Clarke: I simply do not think it is a real description, Chairman. Obviously one could hypothetically talk about any circumstance. As it happens, I was in Birmingham on Monday of this week at a specialist school which will become a science specialist school on Thursday and has got its award, and the teachers there were talking so positively - by the way the children were from all ethnic minority groups - and looking at science in a very, very excited and positive way. So, almost, my experience is counter-intuitive to what you are describing. However, if there were some malign force which was trying to sponsor a vast range of city academies and was dropping them down in urban centres to promote Christianity at the expense of other religions and to undermine the scientific base of our understanding of the world, yes, I would be worried, but I do not believe that is the case at all. Q223 Chairman: I think you are parodying my remarks; I was not talking about a malign influence. Mr Clarke: I beg your pardon. Q224 Chairman: I was talking about what people are talking about, that particular groups are interested in sponsoring academies. Mr Clarke: I think we are talking slightly at cross-purposes, Chairman, because I am aware of one sponsor who gives rise to these concerns - not in Birmingham as far as I know. My answer to that question is that the test is the teaching and learning that is taking place - what is actually going on in the school - rather than the nature and beliefs of a given sponsor. That would be my answer. I am not aware of a concern even of a widespread number of either individuals or groups or whatever seeking to sponsor city academies with that motivation. Chairman: I understand from Jeff Ennis that there is a link between the evangelical sponsors for his two. Q225 Mr Pollard: You said earlier on, Secretary of State, that there were unprecedented increases in budgets, but we have various estimates from 3,500 to 8,800 teachers being made redundant last year. There seems an inconsistency there. I just wondered why there was that inconsistency and why you believe that there have been "unprecedented increases" (to use your own words) and yet schools, according to each of us in our separate constituencies, are saying there were these difficulties. Mr Clarke: I put it down to campaigning. What actually happened was that a large number of organisations - teacher trade unions, media organisations and others - did quasi surveys (I would call them) which made suggestions of what might happen in certain circumstances. Some of them were the front-page lead in the national papers, some of them were on various TV programmes and so on, and an environment was created which suggested there were large numbers of teacher redundancies coming round the corner. I responded to all of those by saying, "Let us wait and see what the teacher numbers are", and when they were published earlier this year I then had a press conference at which I said to all those very same organisations, "Perhaps you would be nice enough to report what has actually happened in teacher numbers rather than what you reported as might happen last year", which was that all the scaremongering was utterly false. Unfortunately, for reasons I do not understand, that was not the front-page lead in all the papers and all the broadcasting out after that press conference, and there was no sense of saying, "We were wrong" on those questions that came through, because they were wrong - those concerns were wrong. They did not happen. If you look at the actual teacher numbers that came through, I can give you the exact position. From 1997, if you look at all regular teachers to 2004, year-by-year, it goes: 399,000, 397,000, 401,000, 404,000, 410,000, 419,000, 423,000 in 2003 and 428,000 in 2004. That is to say, an increase. Everybody said there was going to be significant decreases. These are the actual figures from the survey and the annual school census that came through. Support staff (again from 1997 onwards): 137,000, 144,000, 152,000, 165,000, 189,000, 217,000, 225,000 and 242,000. Again, an increase in the last year in precisely the way I have described. The point is these were the increases which came through when we actually did the census, and they were precisely the figures which all those surveys which you have referred to, Mr Pollard, actually said would be going down. They said we would have less teachers because of the alleged funding crisis that took place. It did not happen. Now, as I say, you asked me the question and the reason I gave was campaigning, because actually all the organisations concerned were campaigning for more resources. I do not mind that, that is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but to do so they have created an, essentially, spurious survey and got news headlines for that, which actually was not borne out. I am still hoping today that, maybe, we will see headlines in the papers tomorrow on education which reports the Prime Minister's speech and deals with the fact that we have had increases in teacher numbers and support staff numbers in every school in every part of the country, because that is the actual story of what has happened. Q226 Mr Pollard: There are 700 fewer teachers in primary schools, which you explain is as a result of falling rolls. Given the Government's early years agenda, would it not make sense to retain these primary teachers within the system? Mr Clarke: I agree and that is what my answer was to the Chairman earlier. I think the development (a) of the early years agenda, as you say, Mr Pollard, and (b) of the extended school approach gives rise to the fact that we can see more resources going in in these areas, and to see ways in which we can not just retain individuals - that is a secondary question - but retain the resource to make it go, and I think that is precisely the way we should be attacking this problem. Q227 Mr Pollard: David Normington recently said to us there is a need for "more qualified people for under-fives". Is that more teachers or other qualified staff? Mr Clarke: It is a whole range of qualified staff, including teachers. This is one of our very, very biggest challenges, Mr Pollard, and I am glad you have asked questions about it. The situation is that you have a large number of professionals working with under-fives: teachers, nursery nurses, therapists of various kinds (speech therapists, for example) and community nurses - a wide range of different people working with under-fives with different qualifications, different expertises and different roles. A key element in the Sector Skills Council for people working with children which we have established is to establish what kind of common core of training and skills we can build up between the different people, how we can get the partnership working happening - and the best example of that is the SureStart initiative where that partnership working is happening - so that everybody can work well together. Part of that is teachers but it is only part of the spectrum of different professionals working with children at that age range, where I acknowledge - and we have acknowledged publicly - there is a major investment in resource which is needed to train and develop those people in a positive way. That is a commitment we have got going through the CSR process, to really put resources in hand. Q228 Mr Pollard: It has been stated regularly that student numbers are falling. Certainly in the Greater South East that is not the case at all; in my own constituency student numbers are going up and all our schools are full. There is a great imbalance in the system; there are newly qualified teachers in the North East who cannot get into teaching, never mind jobs, yet we are short in the South East. How are you going to square that? Mr Clarke: Simply by trying to ensure that we understand the situation better and we signpost the recruitment opportunities better. You do have the issue you have described of pupil numbers moving in different ways in different parts of the country, though there are common places across the whole age range which is there. To encourage people to move and to provide incentives we announced a series of measures, for example, on housing for essential workers in the South East, on which we are attempting to deal with some of those concerns that were made. Mr Pollard: In my own constituency, five head teachers are leaving this year. Some of that is put down to pressure and burnouts and other things like that. It has been a concern of mine that head teachers are absolutely key in any school and if head teachers are suffering this burnout - or however it is described - how can we tackle that? Should we have a sabbatical for them, perhaps, every six or seven years, where they can go and knit or do gardening or whatever they want to do? Chairman: Is this for head teachers only, Mr Pollard? Q229 Mr Pollard: And Chairmen of Select Committees, obviously! Mr Clarke: Most ministers' sabbaticals are involuntary rather than voluntary, but some are voluntary, of course, as we know. The situation is I am actually quite in favour of developing sabbaticals and I have started thinking about ways in which we can do that, because I think there is a case - not only for head teachers actually - for having some kind of refreshment. Some of the trade unions are arguing for that position, and I think it would be beneficial if we could achieve that for a variety of different reasons. So I do not dismiss that particular idea at all. More seriously, however, for head teachers, the head teacher is the key person. Each of those 26,000 head teachers are the key people to delivering everything that we have to do, and we focused very hard on that with National Colleges and School Leadership, and the incentive grant programme (?) has been particular important in addressing this in various ways. You have to take it on a case-by-case basis. In some cases, bluntly, it is good that the head teacher is leaving and creating space for new blood in that area; in other cases it is outstanding people who have been burned out by the pressures of the moment and a rest will help sort the situation - or support from another colleague, mentoring, or whatever. So it is a horses-for-courses answer, in my opinion. So I do not think a generalised solution - eg a sabbatical - solves it, but I think everybody in the whole system needs to focus on supporting and finding the right head teacher to lead a school. If I can be candid, Mr Pollard, I think that means sometimes finding a way to face up to the fact that a head teacher is not cutting it in a particular circumstances and, in not cutting it, is letting down the children who are there. In my opinion we have to create a system which does not tolerate that, because it is not acceptable, in a role of that absolutely key nature, that they can stay in that role when they are not delivering for the pupils in that area. Q230 Mr Pollard: Much is made these days of choice, Secretary of State. One of the schools in my constituency, St Albans' Girls School, is three times over-subscribed, year-on-year, so two out of those three over-subscribed will not be able to get their choice. Is it the right description to say "choice" or should we use some other word? Mr Clarke: "Choice" is a funny word. It is used very widely in politics, at the moment. Part of it is about choice between schools, as you say, and it remains the case that a very high proportion of people get their first choice of school, at whatever level it is. I also believe it is a question of choice within the schools, so that an individual within a school has got a better ability to identify the curriculum that is right for them and carry that through (and I think we have seen some very positive developments recently in that area). Collaborations between schools - which, for example, the specialist schools system has encouraged and the city programme (?) has encouraged - is already allowing a wider choice, not between schools but within the school framework, to help particular individuals get what they want. I do, in that sense, think choice is the right word, but I hope the best answer on all choice questions is to get a high quality school in your locality which you really can have confidence in. That is what we have to achieve. There are still communities where that is not the case and that is what we have to achieve. But I think the idea that there is choice is important to achieving that in each locality. Q231 Paul Holmes: Just back-tracking, for clarification, to some of the previous points made, David Chaytor was asking you about the new proposals to let popular schools expand. How would that work in terms of the capital funding? The two most popular secondary schools in my constituency are absolutely bursting at the seams. One of the schools' regular complaint every year is that the independent appeals panel forces more and more people in which they just cannot take. The only way they could expand, if they wanted to, would be to build whole new teaching blocks. How do they get the capital to do that, and do they get it at the expense of another school with old, clapped-out, 1960s classrooms who were hoping, under the Building Schools for the Future programme to get them replaced? Does one of the less fortunate schools lose out in order to build a brand new teaching block? Mr Clarke: The short answer to the question is no; the capital will be allocated in precisely the same way as it currently is, so the decision will have to be made - in your case - by the local authority on where its resource will go. So, is it going to fund the expansion at the expanding school, or is it going to go, by your hypothesis, to the clapped-out other school which is there? That resource will be for the local authority to decide in precisely the same way. What we are doing, however, is to try and accelerate the programme so that people are able to expand if they wish to do so, in principle, but the issue you raise of the capital does not change fundamentally, because it would be ridiculous to be in a state of affairs where the local authority was required to prioritise capital for certain types of situations as opposed to certain other situations. They will have to look at the situation in the round and make their judgment in the most appropriate way. What we are saying is that a candidate for that capital could be an expanding school in the situation you describe in your constituency - bursting at the seams. You can come forward and say, "We would like the capital", but we are not saying you have the right to have the capital, if you see what I mean - the decision still has to be made as to whether the money should be spent in that way rather than the competing demands which you have just described. Q232 Paul Holmes: So the newly announced policy of allowing schools to expand might meet a brick wall because the LEA might say "No, we are going to replace the old 1960s classrooms rather than let you expand"? Mr Clarke: That could be the case. It is not newly announced, we are making announcements later this week and when we have made the announcements you will be able to make your commentary. As you are asking me about what has been said in the situation, as I was saying earlier to Mr Chaytor, we are not saying that the right to expand carries with it an automatic entitlement to a chunk of capital to be able to expand in that way. The capital allocation processes will remain broadly as they are. That is one of the reasons I was saying to Mr Chaytor, that I think some of the fears about the increased flexibility in the system, which I think is desirable, are overstated because, actually, there will still be that capital constraint. Of course, it is a substantially expanding capital situation but the capital constraint will still be there; it has to be allocated according to priorities which are set by the local authority. Q233 Paul Holmes: The other question was on the question of the city academies. You were saying that it does help to pull in extra money to deprived urban areas, but are you not overstating the case for that? With the city technology colleges, under the previous government, they said, "We will get all this money in from the private sector", but it never materialised and the taxpayer had to bail out the few that were set up. With the academies, you are asking the private sponsor to provide two million but the taxpayer puts 22 million in and the taxpayer picks up all the on-going costs of maintenance, staff and everything, but the private sponsor, who has put in a very small chunk of the overall sum, then gets control over admissions, the teaching of creationism in science lessons, and so forth. Mr Clarke: Let us be absolutely clear: you are right about the overall balance of funding, and you are also right - a point not often indicated and is in sharp contrast to the Conservatives - that the level of funding per student at the city academy is the same as it is for any other school in that particular locality, so we are not putting in extra revenue funding in that way - so it is not saying you get more money if you become a city academy, or whatever. So in that sense you are right about the overall financial resource issue. It is true that we believe that bringing in sponsors of this kind, and having bodies that work in that way is of itself a bazooka boost to try and carry the situation through in a positive way. It does not give the sponsor the right to control admissions because there is a code of admissions to which all city academies have to adhere and carry through. There are issues, though, along the lines Mr Chaytor was asking earlier on, that they can control the admissions policy but within the code which is established which has sets of criteria, for example, about special educational needs and so on, and they cannot violate those core principles. As far as teaching in schools is concerned and what is taught in a science lesson, as I said to the Chairman, they all have to teach in accordance with the National Curriculum and I think it would be a very serious matter indeed if Ofsted, in its recommendations, were to say science was being taught in the way you describe and not being properly taught. I certainly would take that very seriously and it would not be the right way to proceed, in my view. So the test I have for how an academy works, from that point of view, will be based on what is actually happening in the school. Q234 Paul Holmes: Just on the issue of choice that you were talking about earlier, if the Vardy Foundation, who run Emmanuel College, have got the consultancy over teaching creationism (?), if they take over the school in Conisbrough and do the same thing there - I have heard parents on the radio from there saying "I don't want my child going to a fundamentalist school which teaches creationism in science" - what choice does that parent have in a very small town like Conisbrough where there is not exactly a dozen secondary schools they can pick from? Mr Clarke: I do not know about Conisbrough, but you are quite right, in any rural community - or even relatively rural community - choice is far more limited than it is in an urban community for simple reasons of geography. I think the question that really has to be asked is: are parents who are giving the comments you describe basing their knowledge on the facts of the situation or are they basing it on a propagandistic allegation about what is taking place which is actually not true? I am sorry to be repetitive but I come back to the point I made to the Chairman, the question is what is actually going on in the school. The parent has to make a judgment on that basis about the school. You are quite right to say that choice is much more restricted in areas where there is much less geographical ability to operate, but I cannot solve that in any way. I cannot say, "However large the settlement we are going to have 16 different schools from which you can choose" - we simply cannot - and that is a reality of the world in which we are. Q235 Paul Holmes: From your position do you not have some responsibility? Even without the creationist issue, if you have parents in a smaller town or village and their other local school is a faith school and they say, "I don't want my child to go to a faith school", what choice is therefore being offered in that situation? You are encouraging the setting up of faith schools and academies and so forth. Mr Clarke: A limited choice, but that is exactly the situation that exists today. The question is can we extend the choice. Actually, by federations of schools and collaborations, I think we can. We are already seeing, particularly post-16, collaborations of schools. For example, in Norfolk there is a group of schools 20 or 30 miles apart who are collaborating on their curriculum - including pre-16, by the way - in a variety of different ways, and very much post-16. So more choice will become available than has ever been the case before. You are absolutely right, if there is a given rural community that is there and there is a school in that community, choice is very limited for people living in that community. That is the case, and I cannot wave my magic wand and solve that. Actually, I think there is more progress happening in this area - not as a result of the Government particularly but as a result of technology in other areas - than there has ever been; we are beginning to open up choices more in those areas. However, your fundamental point, Mr Holmes, is true, that choice is extremely limited in rural areas - that is the fact. Can I add one point to what I said to Mr Holmes, which is to go back to what I said to Mr Pollard, that nevertheless choice within the particular school, choice within the curriculum, can be, and is being, extended, which is also positive, and that is not affected by the conversation I have just had with Mr Holmes. That is another area in which choice is being developed. Q236 Chairman: Secretary of State, that may be right but I am sure you have not had time to read our report on the School Transport Bill yet. Mr Clarke: I have read it, actually, yes. Q237 Chairman: You have read it? That is very good because you must have got it last night. We point out in that that the Government does seem to have two minds on this. On the one hand, you say to the Transport Select Committee, who looked at the Bill, that you wanted to encourage people to go to their local schools but, on the other, we have a whole raft of policies that encourage people to travel further to a diverse mix of specialist schools and much else. In one sense that does seem strange to us. It came out very clearly as we took evidence on the School Transport Bill that the whole thrust of the Government's agenda on choice does mean people moving around more not less. Mr Clarke: I do not entirely accept that. Let me just say, I was going to comment in detail on your report but perhaps I will do that in due course. I read from the report that the Committee's view is we should just drop the Bill, and if that is in fact the case I would be ---- Q238 Chairman: No, at no stage did we say that in the report. Mr Clarke: You may not have used those words but that was the whole implication of the report. Q239 Chairman: No, Secretary of State, I am sorry. If you want to know what the thrust of the Bill is, we think, as it is presently framed, it is a missed opportunity. It is a missed opportunity because it should be much more - not just about cutting down the school run and traffic congestion in the mornings - about children's health, walking to school or cycling to school; it should be more about the environment, cutting down emissions and global warming, and we believe that 2011 is far too long to wait for real improvements and we believe that you should actually liberate all education authorities to come up with innovative, new transport for school plans outside the 26. We do not say you should scrap the Bill, we think you should improve it. Mr Clarke: May we just have a quick exchange on that, Chairman, because I am very interested in what you have just said. Q240 Chairman: Absolutely. If you have interpreted it in that way - do any of my colleagues think we asked them to drop the Bill? Mr Clarke: I read the report very carefully last night because I was very interested in what you had to say, not actually from the point of view of preparation for this session this morning because I did not anticipate we would be giving great attention to this this morning, but because I am in a dilemma as to what to do about the School Transport Bill. To be frank, local government has said it wants it, the opposition parties in Parliament nationally have said they are going to vote against it because they do not think it is the right thing to do, and they are ready to go to the most scurrilous degrees to whip up concerns about it which are entirely unfounded, which I said across the Floor of the House directly. So I have a choice to make as to how to proceed. I think - and the Transport Select Committee and, to an extent, your Select Committee thinks - that we should be going down this course in a general way, but it is so qualified around that it leads me to think: "Is it really worth going down that path?" I am trying to come to a view. It is significant, Chairman, that I had read your report as being of the view "Just don't do it", and in fact the news-reporting this morning of your report implies that we should drop it as well. If that is not the case I am grateful to hear it, and we will see where to go, but it will be a very sharp debate because I agree with everything you have just said about walking (we tried to focus on that), about healthy schools, about sustainability, about the position of the children, but that requires, in my view, us to go down the course of giving local authorities the right to innovate in the way that we have tried to do in the draft Bill. When people say that we are not going fast enough, or whatever, I can accept that view; that was partly the view of the Transport Select Committee as well. OK, but then I am being told by all the other political parties than my own that they are going to try and kill this Bill by whatever means possible and to campaign in the most scurrilous way about it. Q241 Chairman: Let us get the record straight: this Committee unanimously wrote and agreed that report. We believe that the pre-leg inquiry is an excellent way to improve legislation. All our contributions are to improve the Bill - not to scrap it. Yes, you can take more notice of health and the obesity issue, which really has arisen since the Bill was published - that very high profile and excellent report from the Health Select Committee. We also think it is a real opportunity to make children and parents aware of the environmental issues and what can be done to improve the environment in these pilots. We also said, "More power; let us have the 26 with the special ability to charge". We understand the legislation is needed for that but we believe that you could liberate - you are not giving them any money - all the other education authorities to a different kind of innovative vote over a much shorter timescale than 2011. We have to say, if you read it again - you were probably tired last night - we believe it is a good Bill that can be improved. Mr Clarke: Can I say, Chairman, I cannot tell you - and I mean this most genuinely - how delighted I am for the clarification, in which you have corrected my reading of the document in a very helpful way. I very much appreciate the exchange. Q242 Paul Holmes: Just not to let you off the hook too much, there are two things we do say in the report. You said the Local Government Association are in support of the Bill, and they are, but what they said to us when they were sat where you are now is that unless the Government provides some money to get this going it is a dead duck. That was one of the things you might need to re-think in redrafting the Bill. The other one was, going back to what the Chairman was just talking about, the confusion of purpose. If you are going to improve or redraft the Bill (and, also, in all the issues of choice that we have been talking about) you have really got to decide: are you aiming to do what you said to the Transport Committee and get more people going to local neighbourhood schools, or are you aiming to get lots of people travelling in every which direction to a faith school here, a specialist school there or an academy there? Mr Clarke: That is very helpful because it allows me to address the question, Chairman, you first put to me before that exchange. I absolutely believe very profoundly and very strongly that our aim as a Government ought to be to ensure that every family has a first-class school in their locality to which they can send their children. That is a practice which I encourage, it is a practice I follow myself and I believe it is absolutely the right way to go. I believe there many localities where a choice can be enhanced by a range of different specialist schools. For example, in my constituency there are places where people can live within walking distance of three or four different secondary schools and in which they can have some element of choice as to where they go. I quite acknowledge, as Mr Holmes was saying, that there are other parts of the country where that patently is not possible, essentially for geographical reasons, in which case I say that what we have to try and do is to enhance choice within those schools to ensure that they can better meet the needs of the people in those particular localities. So it is not part of our policy to increase the average amount of travelling between a home and a school by new education policies. That is not what we are about, and I do not believe that is a consequence of the choice agenda; I think that need not and should not be the way that we proceed. In fact, I think the reason for having an innovatory approach by local authorities is to enable those issues to be addressed in a very particular way. I will make one very serious point, in addition, Chairman, which is I do not believe that the genie of parental choice can be put back in the bottle. There are people in the school transport debate, and I have discussed it with them, who argue that somehow we should require people to go to a particular school based on criteria around transport rather than any other question. Firstly, I believe that is undesirable, but even if I did not believe it is undesirable I think it is absolutely impossible to get to a state of affairs where that goes and carries it through. So my answer on the transport issue is not to say "Let us reverse decades of recent educational history and require people to go to a particular school"; I do not think that is a reasonable solution, nor do I think it is a desirable solution. My answer is to try to achieve a situation where, firstly, people have got a genuine choice of good quality schools as near to them as can be achieved and, secondly, we have ranges of transport arrangements which maximise what you are describing: walking, health and so on, rather than people driving around. Q243 Chairman: Valerie Davey, you have been very patient but I have one quick response on that, which is that we understand the genie of parental choice cannot be put back in the bottle, but we would extend that and say that we still continue to say to parents and to say to the broader public that you can push up the whole notion of parental choice to a degree which gives people an unrealistic expectation of how much choice is out there for a very high percentage of people whose one choice is to go to the local school. That is the truth of it. Sometimes, raising the expectations can be very damaging because people become very disillusioned. If you peddle parental choice and actually it does not exist for many people, it is dangerous. Mr Clarke: I agree, but only up to a point. Firstly, I do not think anybody is "peddling" parental choice in that way. The reason why I have tried to emphasise in this discussion here the question of choice within the school, as well as choice between schools, is I think that it is choice within the school which will be a major motivator in this area. I think that is what we should try and do. The idea that people will shop around a range of different schools and travel journeys of miles and miles and miles is not realistic. I think most parents want to be able to send their child to their local school. I think that is what their desire is and I think it should be my purpose as Secretary of State for Education and Skills to encourage that and to make that go. The only way to encourage it, in my view, is by really going for quality in that local school so that people feel they have got a real choice that is there for them. That is the area where, bluntly, we have failed in too many parts of our education system, at the moment, where parents feel that they have not got a good option for them locally. Q244 Chairman: There is a myth and a reality there, is there not, Secretary of State? I am not a London MP but looking at London the evidence suggests to me that London schools are improving faster than the national average, but you have, in The Evening Standard, a kind of hysteria amongst many parents in London that bears no relation to the truth of what is going on out there. Mr Clarke: That is true and false, Chairman. I agree about the hysteria. When I used to live in London there were dinner party conversations (as you can see, I used to go to dinner parties rather than reading Select Committee reports) - and "hysteria" is too strong a word - and there was certainly a huge anxiety for many people in some parts of London as to whether they really could get the school they wanted for themselves in the way they operate. I answer that (and I have discussed this with The Evening Standard, since you mentioned The Standard), by saying that we are really focusing, through the London Challenge, through the five boroughs we have identified and through the schools we have identified, on driving up standards of education in those schools because the choice has not been there. Q245 Chairman: Would you agree with Professor Timbry-House (?) that achievement in London schools is above the national average? Mr Clarke: Yes, I would, and I am proud of the fact that we are beginning, for the first time, to see an improvement which is moving ahead of the national average, so the choices will become better. Now, it will take time to get there and all I can say is that when I moved with my family to Norwich the level of discussion and - in your words - hysteria about this was infinitely lower than was the situation in London; people were much more relaxed about the choices they had to make, and I suspect that is true of a large number of out-of-London places. Chairman: Val, you have been very patient. Q246 Valerie Davey: I would like to refocus back on the department and use the analogies which we had earlier to ask you whether you describe the financial management section and the risk assessment section in your department as ramshackle or offering a plaster in certain policy areas? Mr Clarke: I do not, actually. I think what happened on finances was that we did not have, for too long a period, as strong a relationship with local education authorities as we should have done. One of our responses to the school funding issue when it came around before was to establish a much stronger set of relationships between senior officials in my department and the local education authorities with which they were working to discuss what the financial situation was and how we could help with what was happening, and so on, to get a better level of understanding in the way we operated as a department and what local authorities were doing, hopefully, to get a better understanding from local authorities of what they could and could not do. I think there had been too much of a tendency, particularly across government actually, for edicts to go out in whatever form and people not quite to understand where they stood. I am working very hard, and I think we have done very well, in fact, since a year or so ago, on improving the quality of that relationship. I think if you were to talk to the average education officer of a local authority they would say that they have a much stronger relationship with us on the financial front than they had had previously. I may be being complacent in saying that, but I do not think so. I think we have developed a much stronger set of relationships which has enabled us to address, for example, the point Mr Ennis raised about schools of deficits in a much more constructive way than was the case. So I think we have made significant progress in those areas. Q247 Valerie Davey: I am glad to hear you say that and I hope it is true, but this Committee has also looked at the ILA situation and we have also looked, more recently, at the e-university situation. Certainly Mr Normington told the Public Accounts Committee that there was going to be a risk assessment review throughout the department, top to bottom. Could you tell us what reviews have taken place? Let us focus, if you like, on the local authority school situation. What has happened since then within the department to change things? Mr Clarke: A tremendous amount. What has happened is that we have a group of senior officials in the department who, both on advice to myself and the Minister of State, Mr Miliband, are working very closely in establishing what the financial situation of schools is likely to be and what the financial situation of local education authorities has been. The activities that they undertake in this are, firstly, dialogue with the individual LEAs, secondly, dialogue with groups of school and, thirdly, a training programme which we put in place with a major consultancy to provide proper training to schools and LEAs on how they manage their financial budgets, and a much more serious risk assessment programme that is there. You mentioned one or two other areas of the department's work but I am more proud of what has been achieved in relation to schools finance and LEA finance than I am of any other single area that we have achieved. We have made a significant step forward in the quality of our management arrangements. The test will be - as I was being asked earlier on - whether that carries through successfully into 05/06, as I hope it will. I receive, personally, a report every week on the latest state of affairs of what is coming through, for the obvious reason, Ms Davey, which is that politically I felt vulnerable on the whole question of school funding and I wanted to make sure we had it working completely in a better way. I think we have made progress for that reason. Q248 Valerie Davey: What about the remodelling of other policies? For example, are you confident that now you have got the consent for the HE Bill you will be able to do the phasing from the present Student Loans Company to the future plans of deferred payment? Mr Clarke: Yes. We work very hard in the higher education area. The Student Loans company itself has gone through a major process of trying to transform what it itself is doing to be able to deal with those questions properly. You ask am I confident. Yes, I am confident; I feel very confident that we have worked through and risk assessed carefully the implications of the changes that we are talking about, which are, as you say, significant. I believe that we will be able to demonstrate, once the new system is up and running, the truth of what I am saying. Q249 Valerie Davey: I understand from questions that we asked David Normington while he was here that during the process of the Bill, in fact, you had to bring in additional staffing, and I can understand that - it was very detailed financial work. Can you tell us who is responsible now for the loans company? Mr Clarke: The loans company is responsible for it. Q250 Valerie Davey: Which company runs the loan company, as it were? Mr Clarke: It is The Student Loans Company, which Keith Bedell-Pearce is the chairman of, based in Glasgow. It is a company which is there as a non-departmental public body and, actually, that is a very impressive new approach. I have been up there and listened, and it is very interesting to see how they are dealing with individual inquiries in a very modern and up-to-date world which would be a good comparison with any modern financial company that operates. Q251 Valerie Davey: Are they going to take on the work of the EMAs? Mr Clarke: That is not currently intended. It is the local authorities which do the EMAs. We think that it would be wrong to give the Student Loans Company additional, extra responsibilities at this point when we have got the change you describe coming round the corner. I could imagine a time in the future where that could happen. At the moment there is an issue because all local authorities have a higher education grant system as well and it is a question of whether it is right to have that side-by-side with the Student Loans Company operation. The question of whether we should be trying to do better in co-operation there is something that we are considering, but the first priority for the Student Loans Company is to get itself bedded-in following the HE reforms in a way that means when I next come in front of this Committee you will not be able to say to me "You were wrong in your confidence". Q252 Valerie Davey: Can I just underline the aspirations that we have raised in terms of EMAs now that it is being rolled out this September. Again, you intimated that this was partly LEA's responsibility, are you confident that is going to be delivering for those young people who are really in my area confident, and in huge expectation of what it is going to do for them, that they will not be disappointed? Mr Clarke: I am very, very confident indeed. It is, again, a major reform of which I am very proud. I think it will make a major difference. Ms Davey we only did it after quite careful consideration because we piloted it and there was a doubt about whether the extra financial incentive would make a difference and the "deadweight cost" would simply come through with the getting expenditure for little result. That was a question we asked ourselves through the pilot regime. There was secondly a doubt - a doubt to which you have referred - as to whether it would be efficiently run and the various criteria would be properly operating. We satisfied ourselves looking at the pilot on both of those questions and it was on that basis that we decided then to roll the programme out nationally, and that is where we stand. Valerie Davey: Could you just confirm or deny what we had understood which was that Capita was running EMAs? Q253 Chairman: Or is that just the computer system? Mr Clarke: I think it is just the computers but I will need to write to you on it. I do not think that is right. If you are asking me to confirm or deny --- Q254 Valerie Davey: No, I am asking a genuine question, I do not know the answer. Mr Clarke: My immediate inclination would have been simply to deny but because I am aware that I am in front of you I need to be careful what I say. Could I offer you a qualified denial, subject to what I then write to you. Q255 Chairman: The Permanent Secretary said they were but whether it is the computer system or the whole thing? Mr Clarke: What you have is the local thing which operates where the LEAs are in fact running it and carrying it forward. You have a national computer system which went out to tender and I think it is right that Capita is doing that. Is that what is meant by running it? I think what I had better do, Chairman, not to confuse myself, further is to write you a letter which I will do in the next 24 hours just to go through and set out exactly what the arrangements are. Valerie Davey: Thank you very much indeed. Given how busy you are I accept that as a very generous offer. Q256 Chairman: Secretary of State, that the student loan company, we would like to know some time, and in some detail, whether this is all outsourced and who it is outsourced to? Mr Clarke: The student loan company? Q257 Chairman: The student loan company, if it is doing it itself in house, that is one question, if it is being outsourced we would quite like to know because we are getting some feedback that there are problems. Mr Clarke: Yes. There have been student loan companies who, with the software they have established in some local authorities, have had problems and talked to us about particular problems there have been. We believe those problems have been solved and in fact Wandsworth, for example, had a concern the other day, which when we followed up it turned out was not in fact right. I think the best thing I can do, Chairman, is to write you two separate letters, one on the points raised by Ms Davey about the operation of the EMA scheme and which companies and organisations are involved in that and one on the question that you have raised with me about the student loan company's outsourcing and its arrangements for what it is doing there. If I write both of those separately I hope that will answer the question. Q258 Chairman: You realise our anxiety, Secretary of State. We are not going to have time today to dwell too much on the e-university but to have another flagship project- even though it is rather at arm's length - that one of your predecessors launched go belly-up after the ILA is disturbing. Mr Clarke: To be quite candid, Chairman, when I was appointed to this office I was just at the end of the ILA issue. Q259 Chairman: I know. Mr Clarke: I am exceptionally concerned - and the Permanent Secretary, Mr Normington, as you implied, is - to make sure both, firstly, that we run things extremely efficiently and effectively and, secondly, that we are perceived to run things efficiently and effectively. Both of those are important parts of our responsibility. As we have looked at the EMA system, as we have looked at the student finance system, as we have looked at the school funding system last year, we were acutely aware that we needed to do that right in order to give the confidence which the Committee looks for. I think we are doing that in ways I was trying to refer to in talking to Ms Davey. I will write to you with the additional information. Chairman: David wants to ask you how you are going to do all this in a much slimmed down department. Q260 Mr Chaytor: Secretary of State, your Department spends a quarter of a billion pounds on administration and employs 4,500 people. How many are you going to get rid of in the next four years? Mr Clarke: What we have announced is a 31 per cent reduction in staff over the period to 2008. We are phasing that and there are a series of different stages of that approach which we are going through. Q261 Mr Chaytor: That is about a thousand? Mr Clarke: It is of that order. Q262 Mr Chaytor: In the report it says you are getting rid of 1,460, is that exactly 31 per cent? Mr Clarke: I do not know. Q263 Mr Chaytor: You are the mathematician, Secretary of State. Mr Clarke: One of the things I learnt in mathematics was not to try and clever immediate tricks on numbers. I have enough problems doing this job when television interviewers shove the microphone in your mouth and ask for a particular mathematical sum to be solved, and I am not going to do it. It is of the order of 31 per cent. Q264 Mr Chaytor: In your report the text did say it will be 800 by the year 2006 but in the total it says only 400 by the year 2006. It would be very helpful if you could write to us to clarify exactly what the scale of the numbers is. Mr Clarke: I am very happy to do that. We have had a very substantial process in the Department, including consultation with trade unions and colleagues, to establish the best way of going through this. We have taken a number of decisions so far about where we are going. If it would be helpful to the Committee I would be happy to set out very fully what the exact process is since the report was published. Q265 Mr Chaytor: Of the savings that accrue as a result of the reduction in staff by 2006 and by 2008, will all of that saving go into front line services in education? Mr Clarke: Yes, but with one important qualification which is the total amount of resource that we spent on our administration is a very small percentage indeed of the total amount of resource that is spent on education because the overwhelming bulk of what we spend goes to schools, colleges, universities and so on very directly. Q266 Mr Chaytor: The staffing savings will be ring fenced to education? Mr Clarke: Absolutely. Q267 Mr Chaytor: Given that you are taking on huge new responsibilities for children's services then presumably the bulk of that ring fencing will be allocated to finance the expansion of children's services? Mr Clarke: Yes, but I emphasise the point again that the actual saving that we make from the efficiencies that we achieve by 2008 is a pretty small number compared with the amount of money we are spending on children's services or schools or whatever it may happen to be. Q268 Mr Chaytor: As part of the Chancellor's guidance to departments to reduce their staffing, he wants to see devolution from London to the regions. Do you have any plans to further devolved staffing to the regions? Mr Clarke: Yes, following the Lyons Committee we have been discussing precisely what we should do and where we should do it. We have been discussing, also, how we can work more closely with the Government Offices in terms of education services and how we can do that. We are developing approaches on that as we speak. We have not taken final decisions on it and it is part of the overall process that we are describing. Q269 Mr Chaytor: Broadly, what kind of functions will be devolved to regions? Mr Clarke: At the moment we are amongst the most devolved departments of Government. I am speaking off the cuff so please do not hold me to this figure but I think I am right in saying that 70 per cent of our staff work outside London already in this position. The question what then further is devolved is a matter that we are discussing particularly but the central organising principle is that policy based staff should mainly be based in London and administrative staff based outside London. Q270 Mr Chaytor: If it was the case that following the referenda on regional assemblies in the three Northern regions regional assemblies were established and those assemblies wanted to have a strong involvement in the skills sector or even the post-14 sector, how would that change the work of the Department down here? Would you be supportive of the greater responsibilities for elected regional assemblies in the 14-plus sector? Mr Clarke: They are two different questions, I will take the second first. We have agreed a concordat with the Department of Trade and Industry, the Regional Development Agencies, including those regions, and the Learning and Skills Council as to how we should divide the responsibility for the skills between those agencies. The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and myself had a meeting with all the chairs of the RDAs about six weeks ago, something of that kind, to clarify exactly where we were going and how we were dealing with it. I think we have got a satisfactory solution which everybody is satisfied with and feels we have right. We will implement that, as it were, in all circumstances. That should be implemented in any circumstance whether you have an elected regional assembly or not in a given area. An elected regional assembly would give a bit more of a pull towards that, if I can put it like that, but we think that the regional aspect of the skills agenda should in any case be delivered in the regions through the regional skills partnerships whether or not there is a regional assembly. What we are ready to do, and I have discussed with colleagues in Government who are making proposals in this area, is if there is an elected regional assembly giving the elected regional assembly certain rights in relation to the delivery structures in those regions which at the moment are held by the RDA's Government Office or LSC in terms of nomination, for example, and so on, to get a better relationship as to what takes place. We feel we have a good structure, as I say we have called it the concordat, between the main agencies to work together. What is the implication of all that for the DfES? Not a great deal because a very large amount of DfES work on skills is handled by the Learning and Skills Council itself in its own structure and DfES staff in this is a relatively small number. Q271 Mr Chaytor: Finally, what are the implications for the role of the Secretary of State itself with all this slimming down and decentralisation and devolution? Do you see your role or your successor's role as changing significantly? Will you no longer be held responsible and accountable for any operational measures? Will you be able to come to this Committee and say it is purely broad strategy and policy? Mr Clarke: It is a happier life for me because I believe that one of the consequences of reducing what we do is to reduce a lot of interactions that take place which do not necessarily need to take place which are often called bureaucracy. I think that getting the DfES into a strategic role in the way that we are doing will make the life of the Secretary of State easier in terms of being more strategic and carrying things through. Will it reduce operational responsibility for any aspect of what is happening? No, I think it will increase it because it will make it much more transparent what we are doing and we will get greater clarity. The biggest intellectual problem we have to achieve in going down the course that you have asked me about is how do we limit our ambitions to fill the space available? There is a tendency to say "Well, we have got a project, we will have an initiative, we will have a unit, off we go". We have to say that the reduction in numbers of people is not about making them work harder but about us being more candid about what we can do and what we cannot do and sharing our responsibilities with others more effectively. So, for example, with a particular non departmental public body, do we have the non departmental public body there and then also, side by side, have a group of officials who are watching what the non departmental public body is doing? Actually that is a crazy way to proceed. You have to get to a state of affairs where you give the body the responsibility and you get the clarity but what happens, that can lead to political issues as people say: "We did not realise the non departmental public body was going to do this, that or the other" whether it is a HEFCE, QCA, Learning and Skills Council or CAFCASS or whatever it may happen to be, and that is a big challenge for us. Q272 Chairman: Secretary of State, that is one of the concerns and worries, is it not? I am not accusing you of kidding or misleading this Committee at all but the fact is there are certain elements in what we presume the Prime Minister will be saying today, and you may be saying tomorrow, which enlarges the Department's responsibilities, or might potentially, and certainly in terms of the Children's Act there will be a very big responsibility added to the Department. It is not a big department compared with other departments, what bits of activity that you do now are you not going to do in the future? Mr Clarke: Second guessing of the kind I mentioned to Mr Chaytor, some aspects of our analytical work we do not need to do in quite the same degree but the main point here is we only operate in partnership with a range of other bodies, non departmental public bodies, local authorities and so on. One of the issues for us - which is why I reject entirely the idea that we were talking about earlier that I am trying to devalue the role of local government - we have to work in much better partnership with local authorities on children's trusts and so on and to do the various issues that go through and I think it would be a better situation where the responsibility is more clearly defined across the system within a framework which is a clearer one. Q273 Chairman: Secretary of State, no-one is going to be fooled, are they, if at the same time as you have got a Department that you say you are cutting by 1,400 people - first of all we would be very concerned if that meant a poorer service, and just having a 31 per cent cut does not really impress us if that reduces the efficiency of the Department because that is a Treasury view, is it not - on the other hand, if it is all back office, none of us is fooled by the fact that HEFCE is out there, it is not part of the Department, the Learning and Skills Council is not a part of the Department, and Ofsted, growing exponentially will be bigger than your Department the way we are going, will it not? Mr Clarke: No, I do not think so. Q274 Chairman: It is 3,000 and growing, the last figures that we have. Mr Clarke: We will see how it goes. Q275 Chairman: You are 4,500 and shrinking. Ofsted will pass you. Mr Clarke: On inspection itself, we have a review of inspection, as you know, which we have carried through and come to conclusions, a new inspection regime and so on which we think will be more efficient all ways round and better for schools and other people who are inspected by Ofsted, some of whom have complained about the overall process. It is true I have not studied the relative size of the organisations though it is true, certainly, that many of the organisations we are talking about are larger than the Department. Q276 Chairman: Yes. Mr Clarke: That is true not just of Ofsted but of other agencies too. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I do not think it is a bad thing at all. Q277 Chairman: Our role is scrutiny of the Executive and sometimes when your responsibilities have spun off to these quangoes or non departmental public bodies it makes it slightly more difficult. Take the e-university, the inspiration of David Blunkett, it is set up under the auspices of HEFCE so when HEFCE arrives here I have not got the ability to say to you "It is your responsibility". You can say: "Well that was HEFCE, they were in charge, that is an arm's length authority". That can go on and on. Our parliamentary responsibility of scrutiny becomes more difficult, does it not? Mr Clarke: This is an absolutely fundamental issue which I think I need to join with you on. The issue of accountability and parliamentary accountability - which is central to the way we run the country - does that create a system where we have a direct line of command from a Secretary of State to every aspect of the delivery of education in Britain? Do we say what happens, for example, in a given school on school uniforms is the responsibility of the Secretary of State in every respect and, therefore, we create a mechanism that happens. Now this is not a million miles from reality because if you look at health, for example, the model of health has traditionally been on that kind of direct accountability model in precisely that kind of way. Education has never been in that way, it has been a partnership between local government and national government in the way that schools are run. In the case of universities, the idea that I am accountable for what an individual university does, despite the fact that most of the money is provided by the Government, is again not an issue that has been at the core of where we are for the reason that academic freedom and all the rest of it means you have a whole set of bodies at an arm's length distance. I do not accept the proposition that accountability means I run everything. Q278 Chairman: No, that is right. Mr Clarke: I think if we were to go down that path we would be on a very dangerous course. Q279 Chairman: You are right, Secretary of State, I could not agree with you more but sometimes we have had discussions about how accountable these other organisations are to Parliament through this Committee. Mr Clarke: Quite so. Q280 Chairman: Now, you and I have joined that discussion. We know that precedent was set by the fact that Ofsted reported to Parliament through this Committee. I have sometimes won you over in terms of QCA and others of these, the LSC for example, should have the same status. It is very important for us to know can we deliver on scrutiny. You have said you do not want to be responsible for every little thing they do but now the reverse of that is Parliament should have the ability to scrutinise these organisations and we should be the conduit for that. You would agree with that, would you not? Mr Clarke: Broadly speaking, yes. To give you an example, when I was a member of the Treasury Select Committee, which I was in 1997-98, I proposed to that Committee - and it is for you to decide what you do - that for all the non departmental bodies controlled by the Treasury we should have a process running through a Parliament where there would be scrutiny, directly and explicitly by the Select Committee, of people like the Royal Mint, or whoever it might be, the Bank of England, to go through and to have a systematic approach of scrutiny in precisely the way you describe. Myself, personally - it is entirely a personal view - I think that should be done by Parliamentary Select Committees right across the whole of Government, not just in this area but more generally, though of course that is a matter for Select Committees not a matter for me or Government or anybody else. I think the kind of scrutiny that you describe is entirely appropriate, I think it is entirely right it should happen and it should be welcomed by those organisations themselves. What we discovered when we did it with the Treasury Select Committee, even after I left the Committee, was various cogs got discovered which otherwise would not have been if there had not been that systematic approach going through organisation by organisation. The big missing element of this is local government because in the case of this service local government is an absolutely essential and vital partner and the way in which Parliament works in relation to local government in these areas is a much more complicated and difficult question to get right. Q281 Chairman: Hear! Hear! Mr Clarke: That is a big central issue about the way we operate. Q282 Chairman: Secretary of State, we are getting to the end of our time but we have got two issues to cover. Nick wants to come in very quickly and then we want Paul to lead us on FE or we will be scrutinised by people outside. Mr Clarke: You are not going to do prison education. Chairman: We are not. Q283 Mr Gibb: Can I just pick up on this very important point about politics today in Britain and the governance of Britain because it is fundamental to the whole disillusionment with politicians that has been building up over two or three decades. As politicians lose their confidence they are handing more and more important policy decision making to these unaccountable non departmental bodies full of experts who tend to make these decisions. As a consequence of that, of course, the politician loses control over some important policy decisions that directly affect the way these services are delivered and the public, they are the people we are representing, have almost no say in being able to make policy changes. For example, a discussion we had earlier about mixed ability teaching and phonics and school uniforms, none of those issues is down to us, down to you, they are down to experts, teachers, professional bodies, and yet the public have a very strong view on all those issues. They have no way of influencing the debate and it adds to the disillusionment with elected politicians in this country. Now how do you address these fundamental problems? Mr Clarke: I think the way to address that is to be absolutely clear, clearer than we are now, about where responsibility lies for what happens. The idea that I should decide the school uniform in every school in the country is hilarious in my opinion, we could not conceive of doing it. The idea that I should determine how a school in your constituency teaches English, for example, I think is ludicrous but if there is a comparison about it, it is very difficult to deal with. I do not feel lacking in self-confidence as a politician. I will tell you an anecdote in another area which relates to this point. I had a dinner - I always have dinners before reading Select Committee reports --- Q284 Chairman: You will get a Hattersley reputation! Mr Clarke: No, I do not live quite the high life which Lord Hattersley does though I had lunch with him recently, and we had a very entertaining exchange on questions similar to this but he was eating in a very disciplined way, I am glad to say! Q285 Chairman: He is now a vegetarian! Mr Clarke: That was exactly my point. I did not quite go exactly down his route. At this dinner I am talking about, another of my dinners, I was with a group of university vice-chancellors and I said: "Look, none of this is anything to do with me. All I do is I give a load of money to HEFCE which you all control and you decide what happens". Now all these vice-chancellors fell off their chairs, they said: "This is ridiculous. Of course you decide, do you not, what HEFCE's strategy should be in each of these areas, whether secretly or not, with a brown envelope, in a form or whatever it might be, and it is totally dishonest of you to suggest that is not the case". It provoked a real thought in me: "Should there be a national strategy for universities? If so, should it be held by HEFCE? Should it be done by Government Departments?" exactly the issue that you are raising. Now my complaint, and it is a complaint against myself as much as anybody else, is I do not think we have yet got clarity in these relationships enough and that is why my answer to Mr Chaytor is that going down a more strategic path in the Department I think will assist us in getting clarity for these things. I think it will be the most incredible arrogance for the political class as a whole to believe it could or should run everything, for example, in education in Britain, they cannot. Q286 Mr Gibb: If one can identify through the political process people's public concerns that they raise with MPs, there is a problem in education, for example, or policing that they pin down, and we generally pin down as a nation, the public as a nation, that is caused by mixed ability teaching or it is caused by whole language teaching or it is caused by the way we police our streets. If we see a particular cause they should be able to change that and what we are saying is those decisions should be made by experts and, of course, they tend to coagulate into a national body, ACPO or the teacher training bodies, they do take a decision about the best way in which teaching happens in our schools. A decision is taken by someone or a very small group of people but they are not elected or accountable or transparent or visible and that is a principal cause, I believe, of the disillusionment with the democratic process. Mr Clarke: A quick response to that. I believe it is entirely possible for Select Committees in the areas you describe to have an inquiry into, say, phonics, for the sake of argument, I know you would all enjoy it but I see the Chairman is not entirely relaxed about that as a proposition. Q287 Chairman: Short inquiry. Mr Clarke: You would take the evidence, you have the right, you can summon anyone in the country to come, they have to come and go through the process and so it is entirely possible to do it. The problem is a political managerial one: how do you prioritise what you do and how you do it in a serious way to facilitate this delay? Q288 Paul Holmes: The FE sector is a very important deliverer of education but often it feels it is a Cinderella sandwiched between schools on the one hand and higher education on the other. For example, you have got the Building Schools for the Future programme but there is not really an equivalent for the colleges and David Normington said to this Committee that the reason for the different capital spending on schools and colleges was "...simply a question of Government priorities ..."so the Government holds colleges as a lower priority. Mr Clarke: I used the phrase in one of my first speeches at an Association of Colleges Conference in November of the year before last that it was often seen as a Cinderella and I said we were pushing a resource in through our Success for All programme, which I hoped would end that. Many people in further education accepted that was the case, that we were ending it by the commitment we made then by the Schools White Paper that we published last July giving a clear focus in this area as well. We are making capital allocations but it is quite true that we are focusing on restructuring secondary schools. I simply do not accept today that further education is a Cinderella, in fact I argue that the resource that we have for post-16 education in particular is absolutely enormous through the Learning and Skills Council and is a major priority of Government in an area that is performing very fast. The FE people I meet these days believe there is a transformation agenda taking place of which they want to be part, which includes very strong funding regimes. Now there are problems for some colleges in that because we are asking them to perform at a much higher level. Q289 Paul Holmes: Another example then, a student doing A levels in college is funded at up to ten per cent less than the same student doing A levels in a school sixth form and that is a fairly widely accepted figure. Now, again, David Normington told the Committee that the Government are seeking to narrow the differential between sixth formers in colleges and sixth formers in schools but it is happening very slowly, very slightly. Again, tie that with the capital programme and the priorities, is it not still a low priority? Mr Clarke: Mr Normington is entirely correct in what he said. What you have not said though, it is true, is that it was a manifesto commitment at the last election to narrow that gap, and that is a commitment that we have and it is a commitment we continue to carry through but we do it in a very steady way. One of the problems - to be blunt about this - is we are tending to look at teachers in entirely different bands. You have got schools teachers there, primary teachers there, FE teachers there, university teachers there and how we can develop an approach to teachers and the profession of teaching more generally is an important consideration for us at the moment. One of the consequences of being able to do that would be to have more consistent financing regimes. We are narrowing the gap as we said we would but as Mr Normington said it is still relatively slow. Q290 Paul Holmes: The Department is fairly hard on colleges in terms of inspection reports and saying: "Look at all the things that need improving". What about, for example, the satisfaction survey that the colleges did which had a massive well over 90 per cent of students saying they were highly satisfied, and that was a really, really high figure. The customers, the students, are highly satisfied but the Department is saying the colleges are not doing a good job. Mr Clarke: It is not the Department, what it is is Ofsted. As we established the Ofsted regime to look at the quality of what was being done and the ALI from a different angle, looking at what is being done, the results are not as good as the colleges themselves would have wished. Now, of course, it is perfectly right to have satisfaction as an element in all of this but I think you cannot beat the Ofsted regime to try and understand what is really happening in colleges as elsewhere. We are not inventing the Ofsted assessments, they are making assessments, the ALI is making assessments, as they rightly should, and I think most of the colleges would say that those assessments indicate there is still a great deal of work to be done to get the standards up to those that we want. Q291 Paul Holmes: You would regard the student satisfaction as being less equal than the Ofsted approach? Mr Clarke: Ofsted has an important component of what it does as student satisfaction but it is not the only consideration, in the end it is the question of the quality of what is done. If the suggestion, Chairman, is somehow we should take Ofsted out of all this, that colleges are doing fine, that is all okay, I do not accept that. Q292 Chairman: The problem is, Secretary of State, if we look at it from the taxpayers' point of view, 53.2 per cent increase in funding 1998-99 to 2000 for FE, that is a lot of money. The inspection is showing up some pretty patchy performance. Mr Clarke: That is my point. Q293 Chairman: On the other hand, the traditional unhappiness about Ofsted was that they tell you what is wrong but there is no-one there who is really supportive to say: "This is how you put it right". Sometimes I get the feeling when I go to FE colleges that there is not enough direction from someone to say: "This is how you get your act together". Mr Clarke: I think it is more difficult to make that argument now than it was a year ago. It is not Ofsted's job. Q294 Chairman: You have not got the LEA to come in, who have you got to come in? Mr Clarke: What I was going to say was a successful strategy I think is providing support of the type that you are describing. Ofsted does not have the role, as you say, rightly, to offer that support but I think the whole successful strategy is offering real support for individual colleges trying to face up to what they have to do in the current circumstances. Q295 Chairman: When I talk to LSCs, Secretary of State, they would very much like to have an overall responsibility for helping across that sector in the region and sub-region. At the moment they cannot do that, they cannot help on an individual college basis but they can have a remit across the FE sector. Would you take that up as a concern and write to the Committee? Mr Clarke: I will be happy to but I would simply say the LSC has the job of looking at the provision right across the range, in the local area reviews they are seeking to do that. They are in close dialogue with the colleges about trying to deal with the situation but, yes, I will write to the Committee. Chairman: I think there is a problem there. Q296 Mr Chaytor: Very quickly. Secretary of State, you talked about a convergence of funding between schools and FE and you talked about steady progress but in your annual report it shows that since the 2001 General Election the real terms funding for students in schools has gone up by 19 percentage points and real terms funding for a student in FE has gone up by four percentage points. There is not much convergence there, is there? Mr Clarke: As I have said, the major change that we made, which I announced in November a year ago, was in the 2002 CSR process and I think it is through that 2002 process that we will make the convergence which you are describing. Obviously that is not reflected in the reports for 2001. Q297 Mr Chaytor: If we are looking at the plans from 2004-05 to 2005-06, schools' real term per capita funding is up by seven percentage points, FE is up by two percentage points. There is still this huge gap, per funding per pupil/per student in schools is going up at a faster rate than the funding per student in colleges. Mr Clarke: I will look at the figures which I have not got in front of me as we speak. I think I am right in saying, but I am open to correction, that if you look through the whole CSR and you look at the increased money that has gone into the Learning and Skills Council, much of which goes into FE quite directly, the overall picture is better than you describe but I will look at the figures carefully. Q298 Chairman: Secretary of State, it has been a good session. I am reminded by your mention of having lunch with Roy Hattersley, when I was his deputy you were partly responsible for the wicked press description because when I was his deputy they used to say "The Labour Party never knowingly under launched", because we launched everything repetitively, and I think you had something to do with that, but Roy Hattersley never knowingly under lunched! Mr Clarke: I must make it clear that is your remark not mine. I could not possibly associate myself with that, in fact I deprecate it! Chairman: Thank you very much for your attendance. I enjoyed the session and so did my Committee. |