Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 76c)
MONDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2004
MR PHILIP
COLLINS
Q60 Chairman: How do you compare
the SureStart success or lack of success with the work that has
been mentioned only in the last few days, work in Oxford showing
even a short time in pre-school, in a nursery? The evidence there
is showing that is a very good investment because even a short
time in pre-school raises the educational achievement of a child.
Mr Collins: That is right. The
evidence to my mind is overwhelming. We are starting to gather
a body of evidence in the UK that confirms the evidence that we
have from Denmark, Sweden and the United States where there are
a number of projects, the Head Start project, but plenty of others
too, which show that a year of good pre-school is immensely valuable
to children and has a disproportionate effect on children of lower
socio-economic status. That evidence is really suggestive and
telling. I just emphasise something I said before—and this
is true of Kathy Sylva's work too—you have to stress the
quality of that provision is absolutely crucial. It is not enough.
There are two separate objectives here. One will be to ease access
of women into the labour market. The second will be to improve
the cognitive development of children. They are complimentary
up to a point but they are not the same. You could get more women
into work if you had a thin coverage, just had somewhere for children
to go that would meet your labour market objective. If you want
to really get to the cognitive development of children then you
have to attend to the quality of the provision. Crucially what
that means is the quality of your staff. It brings us back to
the point about people. You have to have a workforce which is
properly trained and qualified, that means properly remunerated
and we are miles away from that now, absolutely miles away.
Q61 Chairman: We are not talking
about that so much in the other provision for social workers,
people working with children in hospitals. There are reasonably
well-remunerated people working with children in some of these
silos. Is that not the case?
Philip Collins: In some. My own
view is that they are not well remunerated enough and that the
vacancy rates are evidence of that. We are struggling to recruit
in most of these areas and we are certainly struggling to retain
people. As I said before, that is partly to do with levels of
pay. I do not think we can duck this, but we are not talking simply
about plugging the gaps which currently exist. The sort of thing
that we are working on implies quite a major extension of the
workforce and improvement in its skills. For example, in New Zealand
there is a very good example of a country that has made a major
transformation in its early years services. The Government set
itself a target by 2012 having a fully graduate level workforce,
not necessarily graduates, that is an important thing to come
back to, but graduate level workforce. It recognised that until
you have that standard of provider then you are not going to get
the benefits to your pound invested earlier on than you would
otherwise.
Chairman: Could we hold that for a moment.
Paul.
Q62 Paul Holmes: Just on that, talking
about resources and the roll out of the programme everywhere,
if Every Child Matters then it should be of benefit to
every child. SureStart is very much lauded for its success and
quite rightly but it is targeted on the poorest percentage of
children who most need it. Even with that targeting, 40% of the
children who would qualify do not get it because they live in
areas where there is a more thinly scattered population. If we
are going to extend under Every Child Matters these benefits
out to everybody what are the resource implications? Is the Government
committing itself in reality to extending it to everybody or is
it still a very, very rationed process?
Philip Collins: It is a very incremental
process and it has to be. I think it would be fairly fantastic
to demand of Government that they do this in one big step. It
is inconceivable because the short answer to your question is:
if you were to extend what I think you need to every child you
are talking about something in the order of £15 billion.
It is a colossal amount of money. You need to think about the
steps to get there. It is something like a 10 or 20 year answer.
In order to provide the standard of provision that I am talking
about that is consistent with the data on good returns, to provide
12 months' paid parental leave, which is again crucial because
prior to that age all the evidence tells us is that if a parent
can spend the first year with their child this has enormous benefits
to the child. Of course, that is not available to most people
who cannot afford six months unpaid. Then that second year between
one and two, in Finland you probably saw they have a home care
allowance which essentially allows the parent, if they wish, to
extend that contact with the child.
Q63 Chairman: It is controversial.
Mr Collins: It is. My own view
is that that would be a good idea. To do that package of things
you are looking at a shift in GDP spent on this area from currently
about 0.8% to something like 2.7%. It is very large. It is worth
then asking what would we stop doing? We modelled all these questions
and it depends crucially on what you perceive to be the benefits.
The benefits follow five, 10 years hence. PWC did some work for
us when we modelled that scenario and we asked them what they
thought would be the balance of costs and benefits. They came
through, not to our surprise but to our delight, to say the benefits
would outweigh the costs to the tune of something like 2% of GDP
over time, 700,000 jobs created, and so on. We have all the details.
You have to take a leap of faith, in a sense, that in due course
those benefits would outweigh the cost.
Q64 Chairman: This is your graduate
profession?
Philip Collins: Not alone. That
is not the only thing. In the work we did we modelled a number
of different scenarios, but one to which the figures I just quoted
refer included an all graduate profession, a home care allowance
between one and two, and paid parental leave for 12 months. We
added the costs of those together and then we computed benefit
and even on a relatively cautious set of assumptions there are
returns on it which you can imagine is plausible. Indeed, the
returns on that earlier expenditure are good. It must feed through
in some sense to reduce welfare bills and reduce crime bills.
Q65 Paul Holmes: You say the benefits
are very great so it is worth doing, but you are also saying therefore
we need to decide what we stop doing. Do you rule out the idea
of a greater tax break, since we are in the bottom third of Europe
whereas Finland is way above the top of the league.
Philip Collins: No, I was not
ruling that out, but in order as a think tank if you come out
and say, "Let us have £20 billion more money",
in a way it is a really easy thing to do and not very helpful
for ministers. What we try to do is set ourselves a much tougher
question which is to say: let us try and work out how public expenditure
will be organised if it is consistent with the data on the return
on every pound. We set ourselves that question artificially. Of
course, another way of doing it would be to argue for tax increases.
What we tried to do was essentially we took two graphs, one of
which was the work with James Heckman, the Nobel economist, who
showed that the return on a pound spent at age nought significantly
outweighs that at age 15. If we look at the current pattern of
public expenditure according to the life cycle, we discover, you
will not be surprised, that it is organised in exactly the opposite
way, it really bulges from about 13 onwards when we spend very
little early on. We thought one interesting thing would be to
see what we would have to do to make those two graphs run together,
so that just purely on efficiency grounds that would make sense.
That was just the artificial task we set ourselves in a way, but
it does pose interesting questions. It does get you thinking about
second chance training schemes, for example. There is precious
little evidence that Government training schemes have any great
return. Subsidised employment does, if you subsidise employers
to take people on. This is confirmed in the New Deal evaluation.
The subsidised employment part of New Deal has a very good return
and is successful, whereas those people who took up training options
it seems to have had zero impact on their employability return,
that sort of thing, where we might start to look at what we do
not do as well as what we do more of.
Q66 Paul Holmes: Did you model at
all how far with an increasing ageing population and a decline
in the number of children how far you could meet the gap by keeping
spending at current levels over the years and, therefore, having
more available per child?
Mr Collins: We did not specifically,
no, but it is a very good question. The one person who has done
a lot of work on that is a Swedish man who has essentially pioneered
the view that the burden and risk in a welfare society is shifting
from men to women. The crucial people will be women. He points
out that across all societies across time women have said they
wanted 2.2 children, actually over most of Europe they are having
significantly fewer than that now. The pressures on them are really
quite intense. The one exception to this is in Denmark where they
are having just about the number of children they say they would
like to have. He attributes that to their universal childcare
provision which over 30 years has filled in the gap. The presence
of women in the Danish labour market is better than other places.
It also gives them the flexibility through childcare to have the
children they want. It is a crucially interesting question. It
is not something we have included specifically in our work.
Q67 Mr Pollard: If you look at the
commitment in ECM policy involving children in the decision making,
how do you best do that?
Philip Collins: It is very difficult
I think.
Q68 Jonathan Shaw: Go on. Be positive
for a change.
Mr Collins: I think what is quite
useful to do as this goes by is to think what the difficult questions
would be. Involving children: when you say certain children want
to be involved for a start, the best involvement of children is
to provide really good quality services to them. The model of
involvement we always work with is one where we have some form
of committee or consultation process which people have to sit
on. In defiance of all the evidence people do not want to do that.
One of the reasons I think is that the welfare state generally
has produced more benefits to the middle classes. The working
class is precisely this model of involvement because the consumer
voice has been monopolised by the articulate middle class. It
depends what you want. If you think the trickle down theory of
people's voices and the articulate people will make the service
better for everyone by making their voice heard, that might be
fine. What I would want would be extensive involvement with as
many people as possible so that the service can be responsive
to them. Then you really want everyone else to be involved. Across
all public services it has proved to be quite easy to get some
social groups involved in public services and much more difficult
for the lower socio-economic groups. I will be positive though.
One of the big successes of SureStart was that it managed this.
People said prior to that it could not be done, we have given
up, we cannot reach these groups. SureStart did it and they did
it by going out and knocking on doors essentially. Outreach work
was the answer. They got people involved which all the evidence
and all the doom sayers said you could not do. The positive answer
is that it can be done, but it is expensive because you cannot
sit and wait for the people to come. You have to go to them. It
is very labour intensive. I do not think at the moment that hard
pressed workers in the system have the capacity to do it. Again,
most of my answers require extra money, which I think inevitably
is a requirement in this area.
Q69 Chairman: Can it not be done
on the cheap through the voluntary sector?
Mr Collins: No, not entirely.
Of course, the voluntary sector has a big role to play in it,
but I do not think it can be done on the cheap with them, no.
Again, I do not think there is capacity to do what needs to be
done. You can make it better than it currently is by just using
the voluntary sector, but if we are looking at real serious advance
it is going to need some serious resources.
Q70 Chairman: Some of us who remember
the miners strike know that families and especially the wives
of miners suddenly became articulate and very active in the community
which had not been the same way as before. Research that has been
done on that showed what a transformational experience it was.
Mr Collins: Yes, but go through
all the public services and just jot down everything that the
Government wants you to do, to be involved in and you have no
time for any work or anything like that. You are doing nothing
other than being an active citizen. It is inconceivable that people
can do all this stuff. It is the old Oscar Wilde line: "Socialism
will never happen", and so on. The Government is asking us
to do so much. The idea of co-production will require even more
of us. What we know about this is that people do get involved
when it is deeply important to them and where they know they can
have a genuine impact. I think there is loads of scope for citizen
involvement in the provision of local services.
Q71 Chairman: How does that square
with declining numbers of people participating in the electoral
process or indeed local parties or action?
Mr Collins: I am more optimistic
on this because I think that if you try and put up a phone mast
near someone's house and see whether they are politically apathetic
or not—
Chairman: —or build an incinerator.
Mr Collins: Yes, quite.—I
do not think that politically activity has disappeared; it has
just moved. People have moved into areas where they know they
can make a genuine impact. Therefore, what we need to do is provide
a genuine voice to them where they have some sort of impact on
the service. That is going to require some sort of partnership
with them and the professionals, which again the professionals
will not yield very easily.
Q72 Chairman: Phillip, you can get
parents involved in broader action outside their narrow confines
of earning a living and keeping lots of things going to support
the family. The one time you could get an outlet is when the children
are in education, particularly early education. This is the opportunity
of the Children Act, is it not, that that kind of relationship
between the professionals, if they can come out of it, be teased
out of their silos, and parents and other members of the community
could be quite transformational?
Mr Collins: Yes, it can. There
is an opportunity. Again, SureStart gives us some little evidence
on this because the effect on mothers is as stark in some cases
as the effect on their children. The confidence generated by involvement
in the process and employability rates, for example, of mothers
after involvement in SureStart is really quite interesting. So
there are clear benefits here.
Q73 Paul Holmes: Just backtracking
slightly to one of the earlier comments on this particular bit:
are you being slightly cynical or realistic about all the talk
on getting young people involved in taking decisions on this sort
of thing is paying lip service? You seem to be implying it was
not really very effective.
Mr Collins: I think it is paying
lip service. It could be effective. I am not saying it is inconceivable
to design it so that it is effective, but in order to be effective
people have to have a genuine authority. Their voice has to have
some sanction attached to it. One way to attach sanctions to someone
is to give them the right to exit a service if they do not like
it, if it does not do what they want and give them the right to
go somewhere else, normally known as choice. The other way is
you give them some voice. If all you give them is a talking shop
and in the end then their voice is not heard, it is not made effective,
then that leads them to become cynical. I do not see at the moment
that we have the mechanisms by which people's views feed through
into the way the service is provided. It is perfectly possible
to do it, but it involves a new relationship between citizen and
professional as well.
Q74 Chairman: Voice not choice: a
nice slogan. Sorry to tease you out on this particular area of
inquiry, but are you modelling the impact, say, of a deprived
community where 11 to 16 education is struggling in the light
of the impact of specialist schools? Are we talking about a lot
of money?
Mr Collins: Yes, we are. That
is the next stage of the work because there is a danger we think
that there is great promise in the Early Years work. I am a bit
of an evangelist for it. I think it can make an enormous difference,
but there is a danger that if we think we get the Early Years
provision right, then that is somehow done. People are kind of
inoculated against failure later on, and that is not true. The
academic community knows a bit about the way in which those gains
start to fade—not very much—but it is starting to
become a major topic of study about once you have had a boost
from an extra year of education, when does it start to fade and
what can you do later in life to try and ensure those gains are
retained? That is where we are moving on to now. I do not know
the answer to my own question. I do not think anybody has quite
asked the question as precisely as that which is how would you
organise comprehensive product services from 11 onwards which
are specifically designed to try and retain the gains you had
earlier? It is a return to the question of what would you stop
doing. I do not know the answer, but it is something which we
are actively thinking about.
Q75 Chairman: Just to take you back
to SureStart. This is fascinating to us because it is a joined-up
service and there is some inspiration at the moment here. Perhaps
it is in SureStart; you said some reasonably positive things there.
How much of the analysis of what does work has been written up
and now is available to other SureStart programmes or other Government
departments?
Mr Collins: It is written up and
it is in principle available to them if they go to the website
where the FE work is written up. How many of them do in fact do
that? I rather suspect it is a small number. There is no mechanism,
as far as I know, for spreading that around, but the first evaluation
has been written up and published and so that is there and available.
There is a very important question how we get really good ideas
spread through. The number of people employed in local authorities,
for example, just to be spies on other local authorities is very
small. Keeping an eye on what the others are doing is a very crucial
part of any provision of any good.
Q76 Chairman: It happened with football
teams.
Mr Collins: Absolutely: scouting.
Why do we not have scouts in a local authority or just keeping
an eye on it?
Q76a Chairman: Phil, we are running
out of time in this committee room. We have three minutes. Is
there anything you wanted to tell the Committee in three precious
minutes that it is right at the beginning of totally new territory
for us in terms of looking at this area? What else? What words
of guidance and navigational drives?
Mr Collins: I think that to counteract
the sense in which I have been deeply pessimistic, it is worth
keeping in mind all the while that this is not just about scandal-led
policy. This is not just an area which is an attempt to avoid
terrible things happening. The promise of this is really quite
serious. For a long time, particularly the political Left has
thought that social mobility and life chances could really be
altered by policy from 11 onwards. The main hope is in comprehensive
schooling. I think that it has shifted really to the thought that
actually, no, it is not there because most of the formative influences
are then settled and it is much earlier. I am really quite optimistic
that this could be very serious, but it has to be done right because
we do not know a lot about this. The political pressures will
always be for the resources to be reduced because it is incredibly
hard to find them and for different interests to be traded off.
I always plead for clarity. There are many reasons why you might
do an Early Years policy. One of them might be that you want lots
more women into the labour market; a very laudable aim in itself
but it is not the same aim as improving the cognitive development
of children. Different outcomes lead to different policies. I
just ask people to be clear about what it is they are looking
for. Our objective has been to try and find what is the benefit
for children, that leads you to a series of conclusions which
would be alarming to the Exchequer and also involve relationships
between citizens and providers and between different professions
which are really quite revolutionary which they will find very
difficult. Whenever any profession comes in and minimises the
difficulties they think they will face in integrating themselves
into the new world then I get extremely sceptical.
Q76b Chairman: Thank you then. The
Sutton Trust gave evidence to this Committee about social mobility
commissioned by the London School of Economics. What is your view
on that? Has social mobility declined in recent years compared
to the 1950s and 1960s or is that suspect research?
Philip Collins: No, it is true,
but the thing that has happened in the 20th century is that absolute
social mobility has increased, ie there are more lawyers, there
are more accountants, and there are more middle class people.
There are much more ex-working class lawyers than there were in
1900. However, your chances of going from social class five to
social class one: the odds ratio is exactly the same. Absolutely,
yes, it has increased. Relatively it has not increased at all.
The principal driver of that social mobility is in changes to
the labour market. Insofar as you can separate them it has not
been Government policy in the labour market changing. The big
question that comes out of the LSE work is: is that growth in
the service sector of the labour market itself slowing down? If
it is, then you would expect that growth to slow. That is the
big question. It connects with this argument because I think the
work from Scandinavia, which is by the way the most socially mobile
country in the world, Sweden, would suggest that universal childcare
is, of all government policies, probably the most important if
that is your objective.
Q76c Chairman: Phillip, thank you
very much for your time and we have had a great deal of stimulation
from your evidence. We hope to see you again.
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