Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
16 JUNE 2004
MR DAVID
NORMINGTON AND
MR STEPHEN
KERSHAW
Q60 Paul Holmes: Why not equally then
include all the class time the PGCE trainees spend in schools,
which is a significant part of course? Why not roll all those
up and say, "We have got lots of extra teachers there as
well"?
Chairman: Very tempting.
Q61 Paul Holmes: I am sure it is comment!
Mr Normington: Because they are
not on the strength of the school, these are trainees on the strength
of the college. These are just definition issues about where you
count them. The trainees that you are referring to are in the
schools, properly involved in the schools, and so on. The PGCE
students are there for some of the time but they come and go,
and, in fact, they will usually do two schools in the course of
the year, so they are not really on the strength of the school;
and usually the graduate trainees are going to become qualified
teachers in that school—not always but usually they will
be—and they will be experienced often in their subjects,
they will bring in experience from business or industry. So they
are more experienced people, albeit they are not experienced teachers.
There is no . . . I do not want to mislead about this. Those figures
are on the record.
Q62 Paul Holmes: So one amount of time
for trainee teachers does not count, but one amount of time for
trainee teachers does count?
Mr Normington: The graduate training
programme teachers are included in the figures because they are
in the schools, the PGCE students are not. That is a fact.
Q63 Chairman: Can you take us through—
Mr Normington: That is all on
the record; it is just all on the record.
Q64 Chairman: Could you take us through
the planning. How does the Department work? We are told that you
are probably going to get rid of 20,000 teachers in primary education
by 2010 because of falling school rolls—that is the figure
we have from Liverpool University but everyone in the sector believes
there is going to be a very sharp drop: because of the demographics
there is going to be far less need for primary school teachers.
If that is true—do tell us if you do not think it is true—how
does the Department plan for that change?
Mr Normington: I would have to
check on the precise figure, but obviously falling school rolls
means that there will be the need for fewer teachers unless you
take a decision that you have smaller class sizes. There are other
options, but that's a question of resource. That debate is going
on. It does not automatically follow that you should take the
resources away from primary schools. You could do, but it does
not follow, and that debate is being had. In terms of planning
for the future, we have relatively sophisticated means of analysing
the future need for the teachers and setting the targets for teacher
training accordingly.
Q65 Chairman: But should you not have
been planning for this for a long time? On the one hand, you are
training teachers and, as I understand it, you are not reducing
the numbers of teachers training for primary schools; on the other
hand, you do know, everyone knows, this is the last year of a
high level of population coming through primary. Surely you have
a mechanism of saying, "Look, here is a policy. We are going
to continue training this number of teachers and perhaps increasing
them." At the same time it is very important that you make
adjustments, surely, because otherwise these people are in training
now, or are about to begin their training in teaching and there
are not going to be the jobs for them when they get through?
Mr Normington: I believe we have
adjusted primary teacher training levels.
Mr Kershaw: May I come in simply
on the basis that I know a little bit about it from my previous
post. As the Permanent Secretary says, we have rather a sophisticated
teacher supply model which works both with our analytical services
folk in the department and policy colleagues and in the Teacher
Training Agency which does indeed plan in some of the judgments
about falling teacher numbers as a result of falling rolls in
primary and has done for some years, and that is why the Teacher
Training Agency has long-term second recruitment targets, although,
of course, we modify them as we go along. The second point, of
course, is to count the demographics of the population, the teacher
population, as well. So over time, as we know, a significant number
of teachers are approaching retirement age and that, of course,
is taken into account in the model as well. So the falling numbers
you describe in primary, to some extent demographic changes will
take account of that. The third thing is that when one takes the
nature of training that we are talking about, of course we are
not going to ask the Teacher Training Agency to train people for
whom there will not be jobs. It is fair to say that over the last
few years all the pressure has been to recruit and train more
people generally rather than cut them off, but it is one reason
why, if you look at the figures, over the last two or three years
there has been a distinct shift from the four-year B Ed which
traditionally people have gone on from to primary school teaching
into the PGCE, which traditionally has been the main route into
secondary teaching, and that has been a very deliberate shift
to take account of that. That is what secondary people want to
do, and that was where the main challenge in terms of growing
recruitment will continue to be. So I think it is a bit more planned
and a bit more long-term than your question suggests.
Q66 Chairman: I am not saying it is not
planned. I am saying the Committee would like to know how you
plan. This is one of the things we are seeking to learn. A key
political decision on all that would be at what stage inserted
into this do you want to continue training teachers because you
want to reduce class sizes? That is crucial, is it not?
Mr Kershaw: Yes.
Q67 Chairman: When is that going to be
insinuated into your model, because that is a very big political
decision, is it not?
Mr Normington: At the moment the
model is that we will not go on reducing class sizes. In a sense
the position will be stable from now, but obviously with the spending
review just concluded and us thinking about the next three years,
that is an issue that is being considered and discussed.
Q68 Chairman: What about the feeling
in something that we are very aware of in terms of our interest
in early years, that there is a strong body of opinion out there
that there are not enough qualified teachers in early years, pre-school?
This would be surely an opportunity to improve the quality of
pre-school trained personnel?
Mr Normington: It is, and that
will be factored into it. I think that the great expansion in
under-fives' education and childcare does to some extent counteract
the declining primary numbers, because we do need more qualified
people for under-fives, and that is an issue now.
Chairman: Let us please move on then.
Thank you for the answers to those questions. Jonathan, you wanted
to do something on the financial management capability of DfES.
Q69 Jonathan Shaw: You said, and I repeat
it, you are trying to do lots of things. We have spoken about
the individual learning accounts and the e-University. The next
public roll-out of targeted money is the Education Maintenance
allowance, which I believe runs into its third year about £500
million. What, if any, lessons have you learnt from ILAs and the
universities and the many things that you do that you can tell
the Committee with confidence that the Educational Maintenance
Allowances are pretty secure?
Mr Normington: You are right to
draw the comparison, and we have been trying very systematically
to learn the lessons from Individual Learning Accounts where that
is appropriate and moving across to Educational Maintenance Allowances,
and we have a very tightly run project for implementing education
maintenance allowances which I personally have been keeping a
close eye on.
Q70 Jonathan Shaw: I bet you have. You
do not want them to blow up on your watch, do you?
Mr Normington: By the way, in
a sense that comes from a much better risk assessment in the Department,
which says: what are the big risks to us? And clearly the implementation
of a system like this is a risk involving quite a big IT system
as well, and we have learnt that we need to plan that properly,
that you need to get your sequencing right, that you need to work
effectively with your private sector partners much better than
we did on ILAs. The issue of fraud is one that we have been very
concerned about, because in a mass payment system of this sort
there is scope for fraud, and we have been analysing where that
may be and trying to put in steps to minimise it, with the National
Audit Office, as you would expect, watching us every step of the
way. Will it go well? I hope so, but all I can say is we have
done everything possible to make it go right.
Q71 Jonathan Shaw: Who is your partner?
Is there a partner?
Mr Normington: It is Capita.
Chairman: Oh, that is interesting. They
are old friends!
Jonathan Shaw: I wonder if anyone else
exists.
Q72 Chairman: Can I have Hansard
report that the Permanent Secretary is smiling!
Mr Normington: They won the contract,
of course, fair and square and they are very, very big in the
education world.
Q73 Jonathan Shaw: Did they give you
a presentation on their track-record?
Mr Normington: We are, of course,
well aware of their track record and their plusses and minuses
because we have a lot of dealings with them.
Q74 Jonathan Shaw: There is a great big
minus when it comes to ILA, is there not? Permanent Secretary,
I think people reading the transcript and listening to these deliberations
would be rather taken back, the fact that you awarded this to
Capita given the parallels with ILA. Some people might say you
have got the front to put in an application to run this? What
would you say to that?
Mr Normington: It is really important
that we do not attack Capita in their absence, after all they
are a highly competent company. They have a number of contracts
with us. They run the Teachers' Pension Scheme, for example, and
they run it very well, so they do have a track record. The IT
bit of this is really not a complicated bit of system design at
all, it is a simple transaction. They won the tender fair and
square and they are very experienced in this field, but I am,
of course, completely clear about the risks we run, and I am sure
this Committee will have me back here if it all goes wrong.
Q75 Mr Gibb: What does a company have
to do to be blackballed by the DfES? What do you have to do?
Mr Normington: You see, you assume
that they were the main reason that the ILA system collapsed and
had a problem, that they participated in that, but they were not
the only reason. Indeed your report showed that there were all
kinds of decisions taken at the wrong points which sent the programme
in the wrong direction. I do not like to contract with anyone
who, I think, puts us at risk and we took the judgment that Capita
was not going to put us at risk in the Educational Maintenance
Allowances. We are working very closely with them to try to make
sure that the programme functions properly. A lot of young people
will be wanting this money.
Q76 Jonathan Shaw: You do a lot of things,
you try to do a lot of things and in trying to do a lot of things,
you underspend quite a lot of money every year. How much did you
underspend on the EMA? Did you not underspend on the EMA?
Mr Normington: I do not know.
The Educational Maintenance Allowances only roll out nationally
this year.
Q77 Jonathan Shaw: The pilots then. Did
you underspend in the pilots?
Mr Normington: I do not know.
I think it is very unlikely. There were not huge amounts of money
being spent on the pilots certainly.
Q78 Chairman: Well, Stephen is the Financial
Director, so would he know?
Mr Normington: We would have to
look up that detail. We can provide you with it though.[2]
Q79 Jonathan Shaw: Why do you think it
is that every year you underspend? Is it because, in your own
words, you are trying to do a lot of things, perhaps trying to
do too many things?
Mr Normington: Well, we do a lot
of things. This is not meant to be avoiding the question, but
I need to say that we operate increasingly on three-year budgets
and we are trying to manage our resources over those three years
and it makes no sense to focus on the artificial point of the
end of March each year in terms of the way we manage resource,
so what we are trying to do of course is to have a profile of
expenditure which is sensible to get us as close to that profile
as possible and actually in this year which has just finished
we will be within about 2% of our budget which, on a budget of
£27 billion, is pretty good actually, but it still turns
out to be £500 million. If you look at aggregate sums, £500
million really is quite a big underspend, but it is 2% of the
total budget and most organisations would be quite proud to be
within that range. The issue is whether that money is lost. No,
it is not. It gets profiled over a three-year period and in terms
of helping with the school budget position, we have actually used
some of that projected underspend to underpin what we are doing
to stabilise school budgets over the next two years, so that is
how we manage resource over that three years.
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