Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
RT HON
RUTH KELLY
MP
2 MARCH 2005
Q1 Chairman: Secretary of State, while
we are waiting for everyone to settle down, may I welcome you
to this session of the Committee; it is very nice to have you
here for the first time. I am sure that you have long experience
of appearances before select committees, particularly when you
were in the Treasury. This one is slightly different to that.
I sometimes say when I speak at conferences and so on that there
is a similarity between the Secretary of State and myself in that
this Committee does cover the whole territory, unlike other ministers
who have bits of the territory. I suppose the value of that is
that we know something about everything and not as much in depth
as the specialists. We will be covering everything today. Could
we ask you whether you want to say something to open up or do
you want to go straight into questions? We can play it either
way.
Ruth Kelly: May I just say a few
words about what I think the priorities are for education, coming
into the job? The first thing which I think is really important
is that this is an agenda which is about equality of opportunity,
it is about making sure that every child has the opportunity to
learn and to continue learning right from the word go, through
school, through college, potentially in the workplace or at university,
but continuing to learn right through life and to make sure that
if a child fails at one hurdle, they get the opportunity time
and time again to make a fresh start. That is the overall context
in which I see the job. How do you do that? I think the priorities
have to be the priorities that most parents would understand naturally,
which are about standards, standards of teaching, standards of
behaviour and standards of discipline, making sure that children
have the opportunity to work in modern facilities. I see those
core issues as fundamental to the agenda. I should also like to
concentrate a bit more on how we can get parents involved in the
education system, because all the evidence I have seen suggests
that the more closely involved they are with the education of
their child, the more they understand what their children are
doing at school and feel that they have the support and help necessary
to work alongside their child and the better the results are.
Those are my priorities and I talked last week, as you know—and
I am sure you will be asking me about this—about the 14
to 19 agenda as well and making sure that we have opportunities,
not just in traditional academic subjects, but in practical and
more work focused subjects as well.
Q2 Chairman: Where we sit in this position
on this Committee and we look at the fact that we have had two
governments now elected on a manifesto which stressed education
and members of this Committee would very much like to see the
coming election fought on this prioritisation of improving our
education system, is that your view and your commitment? Do you
think you could persuade the Prime Minister and other colleagues
to give it again that priority or are they all getting fed up
with education and wanting to try a new fashion?
Ruth Kelly: I do not think they
need persuasion. It is absolutely central to our equality of opportunity
agenda that education should be the central focus of everything
we stand for as a government. I do not think they need to be talked
into this: this will naturally be a centrepiece of our campaign.
Q3 Chairman: You have had quite a lot
of experience in the real world. I met you for the first time
when I visited a charm offensive of the City of London; we met
at the Bank of England. I will not go into any more detail. I
was introduced to you and told you were a candidate at the next
election. I will not say what question I then asked you. The fact
of the matter is that you do have that experience. You know a
lot about management and I am interested in management. If you
were running a mega-enterprise like the Department for Education
and Skills, would you perpetually change the management team?
In the first period of the Labour Government we had one secretary
of state for four years and there was a great deal of continuity
over those four years. In the next four years we have had three
secretaries of state, we have had the whole cast go, some of them
after a very short tenure in a position and the only surviving
minister has had three jobs, Margaret Hodge. Is it the way? Here
is a department with a very ambitious agenda, really transforming
the education sector and yet we keep changing the management team?
Is that any way to run anything?
Ruth Kelly: I think you underestimate
the degree of continuity of purpose that there has been in the
education department. If you go back to the first secretary of
state in 1997, and you had asked what his priorities were, I think
he would have said standards. That is why we introduced the national
literacy and numeracy strategy and we saw that pay off in a very
significant rise in standards in primary schools. That is why
we have had the introduction of specialist schools at secondary
level and the focus again on standards. Despite some changes at
the top and some changes in the ministerial team, there has been
a huge continuity of purpose and drive towards higher standards
in the system. If you asked the department what they would say
about the leadership, I think they would say that actually people
knew what they were about and drove that through the system, all
the way through in its entirety.
Q4 Chairman: What would be a real signal
that commitment over two sessions, eight years, was being successful?
A lot of people out there share my view sometimes when I feel
depressed about a country where the best selling newspaper, The
Sun, needs the reading ability of a seven-year-old? Is it
not, for you as Secretary of State, depressing, that we still
have a society where many people in this country have such low
attainment in reading, literacy and numeracy?
Ruth Kelly: I am not going to
enter into a debate about newspaper readership, you will understand,
but I do think, and practically everybody agrees, that there have
been remarkable achievements in standards of reading and writing,
particularly at primary school level, which are now working their
way through the system. When I launched the 14 to 19 White Paper
last week, the one thing I was absolutely clear about was that
we have to have a relentless focus on the basics, not just at
primary school level, but right the way through the system, so
that nobody in future leaves school without the skills they need
in English and maths to get by; not just to get by, but to get
by well in life and the skills which are needed by employers.
This is why I have insisted that functional skills, the skills
needed for life, are separated out in the maths GCSE and the English
GCSE and you cannot now get a higher grade in maths or English
GCSE without having mastery of those skills needed for life.
Q5 Chairman: We understand and most of
us on this Committee support the drive to get those standards
up, those basic skills, but if you visit schools, as I am sure
you will more frequently now that you have this new job, you will
find people saying that we can drive the joy and excitement out
of education, even very early on, if we are so constrained to
literacy, numeracy, meeting targets, that the joy of education
can be squeezed out by too many government targets. Do you not
think that is a danger?
Ruth Kelly: I do not really, actually,
because it is a pre-condition for success, enjoyment and achievement
in life to have basic literacy and numeracy skills so you can
start to enjoy books and start to enjoy maths and start to find
enjoyment in other areas of the curriculum when you have mastered
the basics. I do think you need a relentless focus on achieving
those basics right the way through schooling and indeed beyond;
there are far too many adults who do not have basic literacy and
numeracy skills as well.
Q6 Chairman: There is a problem, is there
not, that some of the encouraging results which are based on the
department's analysis of results, analysing the test results and
scores and examination results, tell us one story of pretty steady
improvement, but some of the international testing seems to suggest
either that we are going slightly backward in terms of achievement
or even at the very least plateaued in terms of achievement.
Ruth Kelly: No, I do not agree
with your assessment, with respect. The international studies,
where the research has been carried out thoroughly, show that
in literacy, for example, our 10-year-olds are the third best
in the industrialised world and in maths we have shown one of
the sharpest improvements in the world between 1995 and 2003.
Those are tests in which we participated wholly.
Q7 Chairman: What about secondary aged
children?
Ruth Kelly: Our historical weakness
in secondary education has been a lack of vocational opportunities
and practical learning for children who are motivated through
learning in practical subjects and I set out last week how I intend
to tackle that historic weakness. On achievement on A-levels,
in fact we are doing rather well internationally and we certainly
succeed in getting some extremely high-performing graduates who
compete with the best in the world.
Chairman: We want to press you further
on the work of the department.
Q8 Jonathan Shaw: The Chairman was mentioning
The Sun. Yesterday there were 12 letters in The Sun
all backing the Secretary of State's proposals. I managed to read
them all anyway. May I ask you about the restructuring of the
department? There are proposals under the Gershon review that
the department is going to be cut by one third by 2008. You said
in response to the Chairman's question that there was a continuity
of purpose despite there being changes at the top. Is the department
going to be able to continue with that continuity of purpose you
describe if there is not going to be anyone there?
Ruth Kelly: It is true that the
number of people working in the department is going to reduce
by just over 30%. I actually think that is a good thing and it
is a reflection of how we have moved as a department away from
direct delivery of services and towards a more strategic approach
where we devolve responsibility for the delivery of services and
we concentrate on securing the outcomes that we want. A good reflection
of this is the new relationship with schools which is currently
being debated in the Education Bill which is just coming out of
the House of Lords at the moment. There, for example, we ask schools
to have a single conversation every year about how they might
improve and where they see their strengths and weaknesses rather
than a number of conversations with different officials about
different particular interests the department has, where we try
to merge funding streams down to perhaps two, in the future maybe
even one, where they set priorities and where we monitor outcomes.
I think that will lead to better outcomes and a more efficient
approach and actually will demand less staff, because you will
not, in the department, then have to have separate management
teams monitoring the effectiveness of each individual function
that schools carry out. It is the same with the Every Child
Matters agenda and all the different areas across the department.
Q9 Jonathan Shaw: You were in the Treasury
when the Gershon report was published; presumably you were part
of that team. Did you have a conversation with the permanent secretary
when you arrived at the department and ask him how many people
the department is getting rid of, what progress the department
is making to reduce the 30% you described by 2008, whether it
is on target and what has been done so far?
Ruth Kelly: Yes, and in fact I
think, though I will have to check the absolute numbers here,
that just over 500 staff have already left the department; we
are making rapid progress, at least on target if not beyond. We
have a system of voluntary redundancies in place which people
are taking up. I have certainly had a conversation with the permanent
secretary. This was not a target which was imposed on us: we volunteered
a reduction of over 30% in staff because this is what we wanted
to do as a department. We wanted to become a more strategic, slimmer
department which focused on outputs rather than monitoring individual
programmes. That is the way that public service delivery is going
in the future.
Q10 Jonathan Shaw: The savings from the
30% reduction are to go into frontline services. How then do you
square that with the fact that there have to be savings by schools
by 2007-08? Our calculations mean about £10,000 for the average
primary school.
Ruth Kelly: We want to see a drive
for efficiency right across public services, whether it is central
government, whether it is local government, whether it is devolved
authorities or whether it is individual public institutions. It
is right that we always seek to use money in the most efficient
way possible. It is right that schools work with local authorities
to try to identify efficiency savings as well. You are absolutely
right to say that we need to redirect money which is currently
used inefficiently into more teachers, more support staff, more
classroom assistants, working on the frontline in schools.
Q11 Jonathan Shaw: So that is the message,
is it?
Ruth Kelly: That is the message.
We have already increased the number of teachers by over 28,000,
we have over 100,000 staff and this is making a real difference
to standards reached in our schools and I want to see that process
continue.
Q12 Chairman: Three billion across the
piece is a lot of money to save out of schools at a time when
you are giving schools more independence.
Ruth Kelly: It is at a time when
we are actually investing a lot in schools and we are seeing a
minimum per pupil funding guarantee being put in place and we
are giving them stability in three-year budgets, something else
which should lead to much greater efficiency actually, because
schools for the first time will be able to plan. It is a common-sense
approach to give them a three-year planning horizon. It is not
something any government has been able to deliver to schools before.
Q13 Valerie Davey: May I just pursue
that a little? From the perspective of a head teacher and school
governors I am sure they are quite pleased to see DfES staff being
cut, a little unaware, I think, that the implication is for them
as well. How do we keep the confidence of those staff that on
the one hand are being given more independence and on the other
hand there is still, in their mind, a query over what that total
budget will be.
Ruth Kelly: Giving stability in
school funding for a three-year period is unprecedented and it
is something which schools have welcomed as a huge step forward
for them. We have also consulted with them as to how we can deliver
not just financial year certainty but academic year certainty
for them which will make it much easier for them to plan. The
message to schools is that they now have the chance really to
think strategically about how they can improve outcomes for children
and use money to best effect. It is for head teachers to grasp
that opportunity and to get the most out of the money they have
been given.
Q14 Valerie Davey: Essentially, however,
the basic unit for the school is the number of pupils in that
school and at primary school level year on year, now we have fewer
children coming through, so something like 50,000 fewer children
started school this year, the following year and the following
year. In the primary sector there is a real big think; not in
every part of the country but in quite a number of areas they
are having, through the LEAs thankfully, to reorganise. How does
it feel if you are in a primary school at the moment and what
help and thought is being given in anticipation of that drop in
numbers?
Ruth Kelly: This is something
which is hitting the primary school sector at the moment and will
work through the system; secondary schools will see a reduction
in numbers over the course of the next decade. Those are real
challenges that schools have to work together with local authorities
to address and local organisation committees, when they look at
where provision is and whether it is best meeting parental demand
in a particular area and so forth, have to think it through. These
are huge strategic challenges for local areas; I do not underestimate
that. They can also, however, be opportunities and in the 14 to
19 context I looked at this, because the reduction in demographic
pressure on resources should free up resources to invest in local
education provision. There are some areas—and I have talked
to some of our colleagues about this—which have managed,
as it were, to make use of facilities becoming available to transform
provision and introduce vocational opportunities for pupils which
can then act; there can be a specialist provision in a local area
which other schools can use. While there are huge challenges in
the system, which I do not underestimate, there are also opportunities.
Q15 Valerie Davey: One opportunity would
be for the government to have said that they would reduce class
size. We have done it for the five, six, seven year olds, what
about the government challenge—I asked your predecessor
two years ago and was told that it was being thought about—to
have smaller class sizes, either again at five, six, seven or
eight-nine or 10 year old children?
Ruth Kelly: That is in effect
what sometimes happens now as a result of falling schools rolls,
that class sizes do become smaller. We always have to keep that
under review and think about how we best meet the needs of individual
pupils through our workforce reform strategy and the use of assistants
and so forth. Schools are increasingly seeing flexibility as to
how they meet the needs of individual pupils. We are not going
to announce a new policy on class sizes here; this is something
where we constantly think about how we get the best use of money
and the best use of existing resources to raise attainment.
Q16 Mr Greenway: How do you rate teacher
morale at the present time and do you have concerns that there
appear to be some implications for teacher morale in the proposals
for changes in the teacher pension scheme?
Ruth Kelly: How do I rate teacher
morale? I think morale is a lot better than it used to be before
1997 and the reason I think it is better is that a huge amount
of resources have gone in to provide services, so they have seen
the results in schools, they have seen standards increase. There
are schools, particularly those in Excellence in City Areas,
schools which have taken part in the London challenge, which have
seen their results rise sometimes dramatically. They know that
education is a critical area, a priority for the government. We
know that they know that we are determined to make it even better.
They know, for example, that at age 14 there is now going to be
a huge range of opportunities for their pupils to be doing. So
morale in many senses is quite good. However, there are issues,
there is change and change is always difficult. There are, for
instance, proposed changes in the teacher pension scheme which
you have mentioned. We have a job to do to explain what some of
the benefits are of the changes in the teacher pension scheme.
For example, for the first time it will become much easier to
take flexible retirement. So if a teacher wants to work one or
two days a week and wind down their career, it will become much
more economic for them to do that and that is something which
they might welcome.
Q17 Mr Greenway: I do not think it is
understood.
Ruth Kelly: I do not think it
is understood and some of the benefits really do need to be spelled
out in greater depth.
Q18 Mr Greenway: Are you optimistic then
that you can take the profession with you in the changes which
you want to implement, which clearly do have long-term implications
for public expenditure and I understand that, if the changes are
beneficial to them?
Ruth Kelly: Yes, I am optimistic.
For instance, I do not know how well understood it is that for
existing teachers in service these changes do not apply before
2013, that they only apply to future accruals after 2013 and that,
far from having to work to 65 before they receive their expected
pension, they may only actually have to work a little bit beyond
60 to achieve the same pension. There are lots of issues which
I think we have a challenge to explore with the profession and
some actually will see quite a lot of benefits in the proposals
as well.
Q19 Chairman: There is one part of all
this which puzzles some people. Your first speech to the North
of England conference on pupil behaviour spoke to that and it
is in the 14 to 19 which we are going to look at in depth in a
moment. There seem to be two kinds of strands within the policy
which you picked up from your predecessor but reaffirmed. On the
one hand you want schools to have greater independence and it
is going to be just a meeting of governors of the school, despite
your belief that parents should be involved, who can decide whether
a school becomes a foundation school, independent, owning its
own premises, just like that, no parent consultation at all. So
there is this enormous ability for every school in the country
to become pretty much independent. There is another strand of
your thinking which is exemplified in your remarks on behaviour
and in 14 to 19 that you want collegiates of schools to co-operate
together, to work together, to share responsibility for disruptive
pupils, to have partnership arrangements and to many of us, who
have looked at this over some time, these two strands have never
really been pulled together. It does seem to us that one strand
is pretty incompatible with the other. What do you say to that?
Ruth Kelly: I do not think they
are incompatible, although just let me go back a step first to
talk about foundation schools, which I presume you are referring
to. I think the issue has been whether foundation schools can
be good citizens in a community of schools or whether somehow,
once a school becomes a foundation school, it sets its own admissions
criteria, it goes off to do its own thing and it sells off land
which maybe should be used for another purpose. Those are the
worries. I think they are actually pretty far away from the reality
of the situation. I see foundation schools very clearly operating
within the common code of admissions. I see foundation schools
as acting in the best interests of their children and co-operating
with other schools and I think it is a challenge, although one
I am thinking through at the moment, as to how the voice of parents
can best be expressed in this process. In due course we will publish
the results of the consultation and show what fast-track status
to foundation schools will actually mean. Those decisions have
not yet been taken. I also see great benefits from a school becoming
a foundation school and all schools, in conjunction with parents
and local communities will have to take these decisions. They
will be able to take on formal ownership of assets, directly employ
staff and I think they will show a greater sense of purpose, or
could show a greater sense of focus as a result of these changes.
The question is whether you can have a network of schools operating
together, some of whom are foundation schools. I think the answer
has to be yes. In fact I want schools to be strong enough and
have the strength of purpose and mission to want to do that. I
think that they will actually.
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