Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
Mr David Normington, Mr Peter Wanless, Mr David Bell,
examined.
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies and
gentlemen, welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts where today
we are dealing with the reported subject based on the Comptroller
and Auditor General's Report, Making a difference: Performance
of maintained secondary schools in England. We are joined by Mr
David Normington. Would you like to introduce your team, please?
Mr Normington: Yes, I have David
Bell, who is the Chief Inspector of Schools and Peter Wanless
the Director of Secondary Education.
Q2 Chairman: Could I start with you and
ask you simply how much choice do parents really have in choosing
a school for their children?
Mr Normington: It depends where
they live and it depends how many schools there are within reach.
On the whole most parents do get their first choice. They are
more satisfied out of London than they are in London with those
choices. It is a very variable situation. If you are in a rural
area and you have one school within reach that is your choice.
If you are in an urban area you may have more choice than that.
Q3 Chairman: Are you satisfied with the
situation in London?
Mr Normington: Not really, no,
because I do not think parents are satisfied enough with secondary
education in London, and therefore we are trying to do something
about that. There are two ways of dealing with choice, one is
to try to expand more of the schools that are popular and the
other is to make sure that more schools are popular by improving
their standards. We are trying to do both with perhaps slightly
more emphasis on improving secondary schools more generally.
Q4 Chairman: I should declare an interest
because I have two children in schools in London in the maintained
sector, one of those schools is a girl's comprehensive school
which is over-subscribed eight to one, is that a satisfactory
situation do you think?
Mr Normington: No, because clearly
that means there are a lot of parents disappointed.
Q5 Chairman: Exactly. Why do you think
this schools would be over-subscribed eight to one, what factors
affect that?
Mr Normington: I guess it is a
successful school on most of the measures we have of success,
which includes its results, its Ofsted inspections and there will
be other things about the school which parents particularly like
and which may be popular. Without knowing the school I do not
know for sure.
Q6 Chairman: Lady Margaret School in
Fulham, it is a Church of England Girl's comprehensive school.
Mr Normington: That would be an
additional factor perhaps why it is popular.
Q7 Chairman: I have a boy in the London
Oratory, which is also over-subscribed, why do you think that
is?
Mr Normington: Because that is
a popular school too. I think sometimes the faith element increases
the popularity and tends to mean more parents want their children
to go there.
Q8 Chairman: There is a lot in the Report
about external factors influencing how a school performs, do parents
have sufficient, good quality information to enable them to make
a choice taking into account external factors such as the previous
academic record of pupils, the ethnic origin of pupils going to
a particular school, all of these external factors listed in the
Report?
Mr Normington: I think the information
available is better than it has ever been because for the first
time we are producing data which shows how much value the school
has added to pupils between 11 and 14 and 14 and 16. That is new
information that is available this year and it will be even better
next year. You should never judge a school on one performance
measure, you should take what is described in the Report as the
raw scores, the GCSE results in the case of secondary schools,
the value-added, you should look at the Ofsted report, you should
have a look and see what the school is like, you should talk to
the children who go there. You should never make the judgment
on one of those factors.
Q9 Chairman: Could I ask you to look
at the likelihood of you meeting your key target, which you can
find on page 12, figures 3 and 4, what is the likelihood of your
key targets being met for secondary school education?
Mr Normington: It is a variety
of answers really. I think we are going to struggle to meet all
of our Key Stage 3 targets which are set out there. We are quite
a lot closer in science than we are in English and maths but the
likelihood is that we will really struggle to meet the English
target of Key Stage 3, the 2000 targets are further off and at
this stage I think there is a fair chance of us meeting them.
In terms of GCSE performance the headline target is about a 2%
rise each year, and this year we are achieving between 1% and
1.5%, the exact figure will come out just after Christmas. We
are not achieving that target precisely. In each of these areas
we are on an upward trajectory. All of these performance measures
are improving but I think it will be touch and go whether we hit
the targets precisely.
Q10 Chairman: Mr Bell, could I ask you
couple of questions, could you look at pages 42 and 43, you have
some interesting statistics there about how schools are performing,
even taking into account external factors. My first question is
a general question to open up this subject, how do you take account
of the infancy of certain factors in your inspection of schools?
Mr Bell: In advance of inspection
inspectors have available to them performance and assessment data
relating to the school which covers a whole rang of factors, it
covers the raw achievement as measured in test and examination
performance but it also looks at the percentage of free school
meals in the school and also, importantly, it looks at schools
compared to otherwise similar schools, and that is something that
we always report on in our Ofsted reports. We report on how the
school is doing against the raw national data and now it is doing
against schools that are similar. From the beginning of the process
of inspection through to final publication we are taking account
of those wider factors.
Q11 Chairman: Why have some of worst
performing schools not been made subject to special measures?
Mr Bell: The judgment about special
measures takes account of a number of factors, management, quality
of the teaching, the range of the curriculum and standards achieved.
It is fair to say that over 1,000 schools in the last 10 years
have been declared as requiring special measures, and we have
brought about a substantial improvement in those schools. In a
sense to go with the drift of the argument in this Report we would
not simply just look at the raw performance of a school because
it may mean that when inspectors visit there has been considerable
progress since the last inspection or that school might be doing
particularly well against otherwise similar schools. I think one
of the values of inspection is that you take account of a wider
range of factors and you do not just make judgments based on raw
performance data.
Q12 Chairman: Mr Normington, if you look
at the graph even if you take external factors into account you
can see that there are very wide variations in the performance
in schools, why is this do you think?
Mr Normington: To state the obvious
some schools do not yet have all of the factors which make for
a good school.
Q13 Chairman: Is it mainly the head?
Mr Normington: I think unless
the school is well led it is very unlikely that it will be—
Q14 Chairman: The head is the main factor.
Mr Normington: The Report sets
out about five factors which include a good teaching force, a
good framework for behaviour and a strong ethos, a set of values
and strong parental support and community links, and all of those
are important. If you have all of those you are likely to be a
successful school. If do you not have effective leadership you
are going to struggle, I would say that is one of the key factors.
Q15 Chairman: One thing the Report brings
out is that it is no longer an excuse just to plead external factors
when you are running your school, you cannot plead external factors,
is that a fair comment or is it not? If it is not, tell me.
Mr Normington: We are very concerned
that schools cannot use excuses about external factors to justify
under-performance. There are clearly some factors like what the
achievements of pupils at 11 are when they come out of primary
schools which are very important to where the school starts. That
is why we have these new prior attainment measures. There are
some factors that should be taken into account. There are clearly
factors related to the background of the children coming into
the school, the barriers that they have to surmount to achieve
that which are relevant but I am a little cautious about putting
too many factors in which enable the school to justify low performance.
Q16 Chairman: Can you please now turn
to page 20, look at figure 9, which is the performance of selective
schools, specialist schools, faith schools and beacon schools,
why do you think, Mr Normington, faith schools perform on average
better than other schools?
Mr Normington: One of the factors
will be their very strong value set and ethos which obviously
comes from the faith base of the school. I should say about all
of these scores here they are all averages so you can find the
schools which are not performing well and in every category there
are such schools. One of the key factors in faith schools will
be its strong set of values and the ethos.
Q17 Chairman: Do you want to explain
the top line which may be confusing some members, this goes to
the heart of the educational debate, I am not going to make any
value judgment, and I just want you to explain the top line about
grammar schools. If I understand it, and perhaps you can explain
it, this is taking into account external factors, obviously people
get much better GCSE results if they are selected in the first
place, but what grammar schools appear to be doing here is better
taking into account external factors at Key Stage 3 but not so
well at GCSE?
Mr Normington: That is what these
figures seem to be showing. These are figures which are corrected
for the intake of pupils I think particularly in relation to prior
attainment and some other things. What it is saying is that between
11 and 14, grammar schools add greater than average value for
those pupils that they are educating and they add lower than average
value between 14 and 16. I do not think I know precisely why that
is. David may want to add to this, it may be you get off to a
flying start if you have all of the brightest pupils in the area
in your school and therefore there is no catching up to do, you
get going fast and so therefore in the 11 to 14 phase you make
very fast progress. It may be by the time you are at 14 therefore
you are closer to GCSEs and therefore you do not need to go as
fast to complete the final stage from Key Stage 3 to GCSE.
Mr Bell: I do not have any evidence
to back that up but that is absolutely my opinion as well, there
is a kind of that booster effect that you get in the early years
of Key Stage 3 and then perhaps it levels off to a degree in Key
Stage 4. One needs to make the point that the levelling off still
represents high levels of academic performance at the age of 16,
it may be as Mr Normington suggested that the youngsters make
faster progress more quickly and are closer to the GCSE standard
earlier.
Q18 Chairman: Thank you for that. I was
talking to a headteacher last night and he was tearing his hair
out in respect of funding arrangements, there are 72 strands going
into his comprehensive school. Is the complexity of funding arrangements
a drag on secondary schools' performance do you think?
Mr Normington: He should not have
72 separate strands. We are doing our best to reduce it to five
major budget lines, which may still be too many by the way, but
he should not have 72. I would happily to talk to him about what
those 72 are, that is just mind-numbing and that is not satisfactory.
Q19 Chairman: It is a common complaint,
is it, about the complexity of funding arrangements and you are
trying to simplify it?
Mr Normington: We are. It is a
common complaint about the complexity and it is a common complaint
about the lack of certainty about what a school is receiving from
year to year.
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